ENGLISH
CHURCH. HISTORY
ABBOT GASQUET
MM**. MARY'S
A SHOET HISTORY OF
THE CATHOLIC CHUECH IN ENGLAND
'A SHOET HISTOEY
OF THE CATHOLIC CHUECH
IN ENGLAND
GASQUET,
115122
LONDON
CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY
69 SOUTHWARK BRIDGE ROAD, S.E.
1903
LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE
NiUl Obstat
J. CANONICUS MOYES
Censor Deputatus
imprimatur
HEBBERTUS CARDINALIS VAUGHAN
Die xix Januarii MCMIII
CONTENTS
PART I
FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST
PAGE
I. THE BRITISH CHURCH . . . .7
II. THE WORK OF THE ROMAN MONKS . . .16
III. THE CELTIC MISSIONARIES . . . .24
IV. THE SAXON CHURCH . . . . .32
PART II
FROM A.D. 1066 TO THE REFORMATION
V. THE CHURCH UNDER THE NORMAN KINGS . . 44
VI. THE CHURCH DURING THE PLANTAGENET RULE . 55
VII. THE CLOSE OP THE MIDDLE AGES . . .65
VIII. BREAKING AWAY FROM ROME . . .74
PART III
THE RELIGIOUS CHANGES AND THE CENTURIES
OF PERSECUTION
IX. FURTHER FROM ROME INTO HERESY . . 87
X. MARY RESTORES THE OLD RELIGION . . 97
XI. THE RELIGION AS BY LAW ESTABLISHED . . 104
XII. TWO CENTURIES OF PERSECUTION . . .114
XIII. THE SECOND SPRING . . 123
A SHORT HISTORY
OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN ENGLAND
PART I
FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST
THE BRITISH CHURCH
WHEN our Saviour sent forth His Apostles to preach the Gospel
Britain had already come under the power of the Roman Emperors.
In the designs of God's providence this vast empire was destined to
aid in spreading far and wide the Christian faith. And so it came to
pass that this distant island and Jerusalem, where by Christ's death
on the cross the redemption of the world was accomplished, then
formed parts of a worldwide organised system of government whose
centre was at Rome.
The inhabitants of the land, who were called Britons, seem to have
possessed a not inconsiderable measure of civilisation, and their sub-
jugation by the Romans was only effected after a long and stubborn
resistance. Indeed, it was not until the beginning of the second
century of the Christian Era that the Roman system of colonisation
can be said to have had its full effect in this distant province, and
7
8 A Short History of
the native inhabitants settled down under the government of their
masters. After that cities, villas, temples, camps, theatres and baths
gradually sprung up all over the country, and for three hundred years
Roman officials administered justice and Roman legions preserved
order in the land.
It was during this time that the Christian faith was implanted in
the country. How it came, or whence, or exactly when, must for
ever remain a matter of conjecture and uncertainty. But that the
blessings of the Gospel teaching, which effected so great a change in
the hearts and lives of the British race, must have come to them
some time in the second or third century seems almost beyond ques-
tion. Legends, containing doubtless some measure of truth some
foundation of fact which it is now impossible to distinguish from
the poetic elements which enshroud it, have been made from the
earliest times to do duty for more exact history and have fed the
piety of our Catholic ancestors. It is easy to understand how, for
example, they loved to imagine that their country had received the
light of truth, if not actually from one of the Apostles, at least from
some one of their immediate followers. Thus the story of Saint
Joseph of Arimathea's mission and of his connection with the great
monastery of Glastonbury was long credited by the simple faith of
those who loved to link their land with the memory of those who had
personally known our Lord Himself.
More likely indeed, but yet not devoid of many elements of uncer-
tainty and doubt, is the story, told by Saint Bede, of how Lucius,
king of Britain, sent to Pope Eleutherius in the year A.D. 157 " praying
to be made a Christian by an act of his authority " ; and how, upon
his petition being granted, his messengers were instructed in the faith
and baptised. One of them, Elf an, it is said, was consecrated a
bishop, and another, Medwy, a doctor, or teacher. The ancient
devotion of the Welsh to this King Lucius and to his messengers,
as well as to the two Italian missioners Damianus and Fugatius, who
are said to have been sent by the Pope at this time into England,
would seem to testify in some measure to some substantial truth in
this legend. Even if it were wholly true, however, it would not, of
course, follow that Christianity did not come to this country through
other channels. If probability is to be any guide in this matter, no
way would appear to be more likely than that the Faith was brought
the Catholic Church in England 9
from Rome by the Roman soldiers, or by the British youths, numbers
of whom served in the Imperial armies abroad.
Whatever may have been the way, however, and whenever the
exact time, this much seems certain, that the Gospel had been
successfully preached to the Britons in Britain, and that the fact
was known to Tertullian, at the beginning of the third century. In
A.D. 208, in which year he wrote his tract Against the Jews, he
expressly declares that the " haunts of the British, which have been
inaccessible to the Romans, are subject to Christ."
More than a century passes without further information as to
British Christianity. When the light comes again, however, it is to
find, in A.D. 314, evidence of an organised Church sending three of its
bishops to take part in the Council of Aries, presided over by legates
of Pope St. Sylvester. These British bishops assented to Canon I. of
this Council, by which Easter was to be kept on the day appointed by
the Pope. They joined also in the epistle dispatched by the assembled
Fathers to the Pope asking him to send round " the customary letters "
announcing the results of their deliberations. They address him as
" most beloved Pope Sylvester," and say that, " abiding in the common
link of charity and in the bond of the unity of their Mother the
Catholic Church," they " salute him, the glorious Pope, with deserved
reverence." They express their regret that he was not with them,
but realise that he could not absent himself from " those parts in
which also the Apostles daily sit, and their blood without ceasing
attests the glory of God."
From this time onward almost everything that we know about the
British Church manifests it as one with the Catholic Church through-
out the world. In A.D. 325 British bishops attended the Council of
Nicsea ; and the Emperor Constantine in his letter to bishops who had
not been present names Britain with Rome as one among the
Catholic Churches which agreed in the date of Easter. Two-and-
twenty years later, according to the testimony of St. Hilary, bishops
from Britain assented to the decrees of the Council of Sardica
(A.D. 347) which acquitted St. Athanasius. At this time obviously
the Church in Britain was one in faith with St. Athanasius, and could
not have been tainted with Arianism, as St. Bede, misled by Gildas,
suggests. It was at this Council of Sardica, moreover, that a pro-
vision was made about appealing to the Pope, and in the Synodical
io A Short History of
letter the Fathers say : "It would seem to be the best and most
proper course for the priests of the Lord from every province to
refer to their head, that is, to the See of the Apostle Peter."
In A.D. 358 St. Hilary of Poictiers wrote his book De Synodis. In
it he expressly names the " bishops of the British provinces " as
amongst those who have remained " undefiled and uninjured by all
contagion of the detestable (Arian) heresy." He addresses them as
" bishops communicating with me in Christ," and rejoices "in the
integrity of their common faith."
In the following year (A.D. 359) British bishops attended the Council
of Rimini, and their expenses were paid by the Emperor. A few years
later, again, St. Athanasius, writing in conjunction with the other
bishops from the Council of Alexandria (A.D. 363), in a letter addressed
to the Emperor Jovian, names Britain as among those Churches
consenting to the faith of Nicaea.
The beginning of the fifth century saw the rise of the Pelagian
heresy. Pelagius, the originator of the errors, was himself a member
of the British Church, and, when excommunicated for his false teach-
ing, wrote in A.D. 402 to Pope Innocent I. as follows : " This, most
blessed Pope, is the faith we have learnt in the Catholic Church. . . .
If anything is stated therein not accurately or guardedly, as it should
be, we desire to be corrected by you, who hold both Peter's faith and
See. But if this our confession is approved by the judgment of your
Apostleship, then whosoever endeavours to cast blots on me will
prove himself either ignorant or malicious, or even not a Catholic, but
will not prove that I am a heretic."
The errors of Pelagius appear to have found some, if not many,
adherents in Britain, and grave religious dissensions of a serious
character sprang up in the Church of this country. St. Victricius,
Bishop of Rouen, and himself a Briton by birth, was charged in
A.D. 396 by the Pope to cross over to his native country in order to com-
pose these difficulties. He asked Pope Innocent I., who sent him, to
give him " the rule (nor mam) and authority of the Roman Church."
In reply the Pontiff says : " If any weightier causes come under dis-
cussion, let them after Episcopal judgment be reported to the
Apostolic See, as the Synod (of Sardica) lays down and a blessed
custom requires."
The mission of St. Victricius evidently did not accomplish all that
the Catholic Church in England \ I
was hoped from it, and in A.D. 429 St. Germamis, Bishop of Auxerre,
was sent into Britain by Pope Celestine. St. Prosper, the secretary
of Pope Leo the Great, in giving his account of this mission says that
he was sent by the Pope " as his vicar," who by this " endeavoured to
keep this Koman island Catholic." In A.D. 447 St. Germanus paid a
second visit to Britain, this time accompanied by St. Severus, Arch-
bishop of Treves ; and in A.D. 455 we know that the British followed
the direction of Rome in fixing Easter.
This was the last sign of any connection between the British Church
at this period and the Western world. The dark clouds of the Saxon
invasion had already begun to gather, and the struggle between the
pagan hordes and the then Christian people of Britain continued
through more than a century and a half. In all this time little informa-
tion as to the state of religion in the country is afforded from any source.
Of the preceding period all that can be known with certainty has been
set out briefly above, and it clearly shows the early British Church in
close connection with the other Churches of the West. It proves, too,
that, if we except the taint of Pelagianism which apparently to some
extent infected it at the close of this period, the Church of this land
from the earliest times to the middle of the fifth century was wholly
orthodox and wholly Catholic. It is also not a little remarkable that
almost every item of information that can be gathered about the
Church of the British brings it into obvious connection with Rome as
the centre of unity.
With the beginning of the fifth century the assaults of the barbarian
hordes from the North on all parts of the vast Roman Empire neces-
sitated a concentration of forces at Rome, the centre. In A.D. 412 the
Imperial legions were withdrawn from Britain, and although, in
response to appeals from the country, they twice again came to the
assistance of the inhabitants, they finally left the land in A.D. 427.
Over the history of the period which followed there hangs an im-
penetrable veil, hardly lifted even by story or legend, till the coming
of St. Augustine a century and a half after. That this period was a
time of unceasing internecine war with the invaders, and that the
situation was complicated by constant and terrible struggles between
the Britons themselves, and between the Britons and the men of
Caledonia, seems certain. With the Saxon enemy, who strove so
strenuously to dispossess them of the land, the British would have no
12 A Short History of
truce or agreement. In Italy the invading Lombards became in time
so merged in the Latin population that they even adopted the language
of the conquered. In Gaul, too, the people of the soil finally asserted
their supremacy in the same way, and even preserved their native
tongue in spite of their Frankish conquerors. But in Britain there
was apparently no mingling of the races. The British either perished
in the fight or were driven back into Wales and the West country.
In spite of a stubborn and brave resistance, in which the Britons con-
tested every inch of the country, the pagan invaders advanced by
slow degrees from all sides till their banners met in the centre of the
kingdom. The conquest of the island was, however, a laborious work,
and it was not until about A.D. 585, twelve years only before the
coming of St. Augustine to Kent, that the Angles succeeded in
establishing the kingdom of Mercia, and the overthrow of the British
was complete.
It is necessary to realise this slow progress of the Saxon conquest
as well as the implacable hostility of the Britons to the pagan North-
men, who had seized upon their country, if we are to understand the
condition to which all this tune the British Church was of necessity
reduced, and to account for the attitude of the native Christians when
subsequently asked to assist in converting their enemies to the Faith.
Amid the difficulty of maintaining connection with Rome and of keeping
herself in touch with the other Churches of the West, the Church of
this country was thrown back upon its own resources. It was neces-
sarily left to guide itself and to preserve, as well as it might, the
traditions and teachings of a time when it formed part of the Christian
Church of the West. That under these conditions it would probably
have become narrow and exclusive is to be expected. But that, even
at the close of the dark period of time, say, from A.D. 450 to A.D. 600, it
had ceased to be Catholic in any sense, or had become substantially
different from what it had been in the early days of British Chris-
tianity, is at least disproved by the slender information which we now
possess about it.
Practically, the works of Gildas the Briton, who wrote about
A.D. 560, are very nearly the only sources of information available.
Allowing for every possible exaggeration on the part of one who
obviously took the blackest view as to the sufferings of his country-
men, at the hands of their pagan foes during the time of bitter
the Catholic Church in England 13
hostility, the picture he gives of the fallen state to which as a nation
and as a Church the British were reduced, must be allowed to be very
terrible. But, even amid the dark shadings of the picture, it is pos-
sible to glean a few items of knowledge about the religious situation,
which show that the Church emerged from the trial practically as it
was before. From his tract we gather that in the British Church
at that time there were a great number of clerics ; that the bishops,
honoured and wealthy, were fulfilling the functions, and were regarded
as the successors of the Apostles, and especially of " the holder of the
keys of the kingdom of heaven," St. Peter. Synods, too, were held,
and the priesthood and every ecclesiastical order was conferred by
certain and definite rites of ordination. Monks were bound by vows,
and celibacy was practised by them and by holy women devoted to
God. There is evidence, too, of the cultus of the Saints ; churches
were dedicated to God under their memory, and the Christian altar
was called "the place of the Heavenly Sacrifice."
These are indeed small items of information perhaps, but they are
precious indications of the life and practices of the British Church
at that time. They are given, it is true, almost by chance in the
querulous letter of Gildas ; but they are sufficient to show that it had
clung to the Faith, in spite of the storms and distress which afflicted
it for more than four generations.
Besides what may be gathered from the works of Gildas, the lives
of the early Welsh Saints seem to point to the same conclusion.
Their evidence, it is true, is rather that of tradition than of history ;
but they appear to prove the existence of many men of great personal
sanctity during this sad time ; and they exhibit their care in the fulfil-
ment of their Episcopal office to preserve the Faith from error.
They point, moreover, to the existence of great and observant
monasteries; to the holding of Synods, and to the establishment
of schools among the then oppressed Britons. Thus, to take two
or three examples in the sixth century : St. David, it is said, was
instructed by a disciple of St. Germanus of Auxerre in the Isle of
Wight. After building a hermitage at Glastonbury he was present at
the Synod of Brevi in A.D. 519, which had been called to legislate against
the same errors of Pelagianism that had so long afflicted the British
Church. At the close of this Synod St. Dubritius, Bishop of Caerleon,
insisted on resigning his see to St. David, and this latter in the
14 A Short Hist or v of
course of his ministry founded many monasteries and held at least
one other Synod, at a place called Victoria. His death occurred
in A.D. 544.
The same above-named Bishop of Caerleon, St. Dubritius, con-
secrated a Briton named St. Daniel as the first Bishop of Bangor. Here
St. Daniel established a large college. He too was present in the Synod
of Brevi, and dying in A.D. 545 was buried in the Isle of Bardney. This
place was the most sacred spot in the eyes of the British Christians,
and was called by them " the Rome of Britain." It was to this place
of holy memories that St. Dubritius, after resigning his see, retired to
die, and according to the cherished traditions of the Church of Britain,
here reposed the bodies of some twenty thousand holy martyrs and
confessors. Another British Saint of this period was St. Kentigern,
who was born in A.D. 516 and died only in A.D. 601 in the north, after St.
Augustine had commenced his work in the south. St. Kentigeni was
consecrated Bishop of Glasgow by an Irish bishop who had been
invited over for the purpose. Driven from his see by civil disturbances
he fled to Wales, where he lived from about A.D. 543 to 560, and where
he established great schools. He returned, however, to his own see,
and continued to work there until his death at an advanced age.
His companion, again, was St. Asaph, renowned in Wales for the
purity and sanctity of his life.
The above names of holy men, still revered and honoured by the
Catholic Church as Saints, will serve merely as examples of the great
servants of God who lived at this period. They and many others
laboured to preserve the Catholic faith in the British Church, which
through stress of circumstances had been severed from any connection
with the other Churches of the West. They prove at least that the
British Church, even in this time of gloom and isolation, was true
and faithful to all the substantial points of faith and practice. In
fact, at the close of this dark period, St. Augustine names only two
points in which Catholics in Britain differed from the Catholics of the
West who followed the Roman usages the date of the celebration
of Easter and some customs as to the administration of the rite of
Baptism. What the latter difference was must ever remain a matter
of conjecture, and the former is explained by the fact that the change
in the date of keeping Easter was made after the enforced isolation
of the British from the other Western Churches. Moreover, the
the Catholic Church in England 15
Easter to which the British clung so tenaciously was really an old
Eoman Easter, fixed by an earlier Koman cycle. The mere fact,
however, that no other point of divergence between Home and
Britain is noted is sufficient proof that in all else there was prac-
tical agreement, and that the Church in this land had clung to what
it held to be Catholic with praiseworthy tenacity.
1 6 A Short History of
II
THE WORK OF THE ROMAN MONKS
THE Saxon conquest of Britain made it once more a pagan country.
Almost every trace of the flourishing British Church had been
destroyed during the course of the long conflict except where in
Wales and Cornwall the Christian people had found a refuge from
their enemies. Of the seven divisions or kingdoms into which the
various conquering tribes of Northmen had partitioned the land,
the most important and powerful in the last decade of the sixth
century was that of Kent. Its king, Ethelbert, had forced his
immediate neighbours to acknowledge his sway, and his "Empire,"
to use St. Bede's expression, was spread along the eastern coast to
the Humber, whilst the East Saxons acknowledged him as overlord.
Ethelbert, although a pagan, was not unacquainted with the
teachings of the Christian religion. It was probably the belief of
most of the British slaves in his dominions, and it was certainly
professed by his queen Bertha, the daughter of Haribert, the
Frankish king of Paris. In fact, at the Royal Court at Canterbury
the queen had apparently for many years before the coming of the
Roman missionaries enjoyed the ministrations of the Christian
prelate, Luidhard, who had accompanied her from Gaul. It was
to this king, thus in some measure prepared for the good tidings
of the Gospel, that God in His Providence sent the Apostles of our
race.
The story of their coming is known to all. It was what we should
perhaps call chance that first directed attention to the spiritual needs
the Catholic Church in England 17
of our Saxon ancestors. Some fair-haired youths in the market-place
at Rome attracted the attention of St. Gregory the Great a few years
before he became Pope in A.D. 590. On hearing that they were pagans
he was fired with a desire to become himself the Apostle of a race which
from their appearance deserved, as he said, to be called rather " Angels "
than " Angles." Once, indeed, he actually started on his missionary
enterprise, but was recalled by the clamours of the Roman people,
who feared to lose him from their midst. Though laid aside, his
project was not abandoned, and a few years after he was raised
to St. Peter's throne he dispatched Augustine, one of the monks of
his old monastery, with a band of devoted followers to accomplish
his design.
The mission finally reached its destination and landed in the Isle
of Thanet about Easter time A.D. 597. King Ethelbert received St.
Augustine and his forty monks, listened to their message, and pro-
mised to ponder upon it. He kept his word so well that on June 1,
A.D. 597, he and numbers of his subjects bowed their heads to the
sacred yoke of the Gospel, and received the Sacrament of Baptism.
Meanwhile the Christian Queen Bertha had provided for the mis-
sionaries in the ancient Church of St. Martin at Canterbury, which
had been originally British, and which for some years had been used
by Bishop Luidhard for the spiritual wants of the Queen and her
Christian followers.
Later in the same year, A.D. 597, St. Augustine was instructed to
repair to Aries, there to receive Episcopal consecration at the hands
of Vergilius, the papal representative in Gaul. This he did, and
became first Archbishop of the English. Anxious to understand
exactly what powers he really possessed, he applied to the Pope for
information. To this St. Gregory the Great replied : " We give you
no authority over the bishops of Gaul, because in ancient times the
Bishop of Aries received the pallium from my predecessors, and we
do not wish to deprive him of the ancient authority he has received.
But as for all the bishops of Britain we commit them to your care,
that the unlearned may be taught, the weak strengthened by per-
suasion, and the perverse corrected by authority."
The Pope further provided for the newly established Church in
England by giving St. Augustine power to create twelve suffragan
sees in the southern part of the country and twelve in the north,
B
1 8 A Short History of
with a second Metropolitan see at York. With regard to St.
Augustine's own powers the Pope declares ; "To you, brother,
by the authority of our God and Lord Jesus Christ, shall be subject
not only those bishops you shall ordain . . . but likewise all the
priests in Britain."
Early in his mission St. Augustine made an attempt to secure
the co-operation of the British Church in general, and the British
bishops in particular, in the work of converting the Saxon peoples
to the Faith. The account of the meeting between the new
Archbishop and the representatives of the old Church of the
country, as we read it in the medieval story, is now admitted to
be legendary. But about the main features of the story as related by
Bede there can be no room for doubt. The fact that the British bishops
did not object to meet St. Augustine as representative of the Pope
is at least as instructive about their general attitude, as the only
points upon which the Apostle of our race insisted, was upon the
general orthodoxy of their teachings and practice. The meeting
failed, but there can be hardly any doubt that the failure was due
entirely to the general attitude of implacable hostility maintained by
the Britons towards their Saxon conquerors.
The details of the work done by the Roman missionaries in Kent
and the south in establishing the Church on a firm basis are
necessarily somewhat meagre. What, however, does appear clearly
is the Roman character of the work. "The English Church,"
writes the Abbe Duchesne, "is clearly a colony of the Roman
Church. This relation is evidenced even in the material dis-
position of the buildings and their names Canterbury was a
little Rome." We have evidence of this to-day the cathedral at
Canterbury was dedicated as " Christ Church," or St. Saviour's, a
memory of the St. Saviour's of the Lateran ; the dedication of
SS. Peter and Paul recalled the great basilicas of the Vatican
and St. Paul's without the walls, whilst St. Andrew's, at Rochester,
is a memory of St. Augustine's old home on the Coelian, now San
Gregorio's.
The Archbishop's plan for evangelising the land was evidently
based upon the belief that, were the Christian religion once firmly
established in the realm of St. Ethelbert, it would best secure
the ultimate success of his mission. In this his efforts were
the Catholic Church in England 19
entirely fruitful, and Kent became the centre of religious life,
and, at the same time, the centre of a new civilisation. In the
earliest laws of our country can be traced the influence, if not in
fact the hand, of the Boman missioner, our Apostle.
St. Augustine died May 26, A.D. 604. By this time he had
consecrated three of the band of missionaries sent from Borne by
St. Gregory, as bishops; namely, St. Laurence as his successor at
Canterbury ; St. Justus as Bishop of Bochester ; and St. Mellitus
as Bishop of London.
It was St. Mellitus who, whilst in Borne in A.D. 610, assisted at
a Council and signed the decrees, as first Bishop of London. He
had gone to the Eternal City to confer with Pope Boniface on the
affairs of the English Church, and St. Bede tells us that he brought
back to this country a copy of the laws and decrees of this Council
"to the Churches of the English to be prescribed and observed."
In A.D. 616 King Ethelbert died. For a while the infant Church
was now imperilled through the necessary opposition of the
missionaries to the evil passions of his son and successor. At the
same time the sons of Saberect reverted to paganism and expelled
St. Mellitus from London, and St. Justus from Bochester, forcing
them to take refuge in Gaul. St. Laurence, the successor of St.
Augustine, was about to follow his brethren into exile, when a last
attempt to recall the king of Kent to the profession of the Christian
faith, proved successful. The Archbishop remained at Canterbury,
and the two other bishops returned from across the sea. Prom
this time, supported by the influence of the kings of Kent, the
Church maintained its position in that kingdom.
St. Justus of Bochester became fourth Archbishop of Canterbury,
and in A.D. 619 Pope Boniface, in sending him the pallium, bade
him "ordain bishops as occasion should require." The last of
St. Augustine's companions to succeed him in the archiepiscopal
chair was the monk Honorius. He was consecrated in A.D. 625,
and Pope Honorius in writing to him says : " We give you authority
to act in the place (vice) of the Blessed Prince of the Apostles. . . .
For which reason also, in our special love for you, we have sent
you the Pallium for use in celebrating the said ordinations ; that
you may be able to ordain in a manner pleasing to God by the
authority of our commands." In other words, Episcopal ordinations
20 A Short History of
in England were to be effected by authority of the Pope. Honorius
also gave him instructions as to the consecration of his successor.
" When either of the prelates of Canterbury and York," he writes,
" shall depart this life, the survivor shall have power to ordain
another, so that it may not be necessary always to travel to Rome,
or so great a distance by sea or land, for the ordination of an
Archbishop."
It would be a great mistake, however, to suppose that the efforts
and influence of this band of missionaries from Rome, with its centre
at Canterbury, were confined to Kent and the neighbouring kingdoms,
or came to an end at the death of St. Augustine. The work of
the monks in reality only began in the lifetime of the great Pope
who had sent them, and who died in March A.D. 604, shortly
before St. Augustine. The devoted Roman missionaries, after
making their position secure at Canterbury, extended the field of
their labours. It was, in fact, from them and their allies that the
Anglo-Saxon peoples first heard the Gospel preached from the
Cheviots to the English Channel. That is to say, the whole Eastern
half of England, with one exception, first received the Faith from
the disciples of St. Augustine.
In A.D. 625 Edwin, King of Northumbria, asked in marriage
Ethelburga, the daughter of the late King Ethelbert. She was of
course a Christian, whilst Edwin was still a pagan, and it was
stipulated that she should be allowed the free exercise of her
religion in the North, and should take with her as her chaplain the
monk Paulinus, one of the followers of St. Augustine. This was
conceded, and St. Paulinus was consecrated bishop. It seems pro-
bable that to this fact, that for the first time a bishop had been sent
into the northern parts, must be referred the direction of the Pope at
this period, as to Canterbury and York.
St. Paulinus did not lose the opportunity of spreading the Faith,
which the Providence of God had given him. He quickly converted
King Edwin to the religion of his queen, and during the eight years,
from A.D. 625 to A.D. 633, which he spent in the North, his
activity extended almost to the present borders of Scotland. By
Easter A.D. 629 the supremacy of Edwin stretched practically
over the whole of Britain. Bede even ventures to speak of the
" Empire of the English " which the great Bretwalda had established,
the Catholic Church in England 21
and an unwonted peace reigned for a brief space from the Forth
to the Solent. Under these conditions Paulinus began his
apostolate. Yorkshire, the centre of Edwin's government, was the
chief, as it was the first, scene of his work ; but even his personal
labours were by no means confined to the limits of this great
county. He first turned to evangelise the part of the country
where now is modern Lincolnshire ; and here, as at York, a noble
basilica of stone long remained a monument of his apostolic zeal,
and an evidence of the firm footing on which he had established the
Christian religion in those parts. It was here, in the stone church
at Lincoln, that Paulinus consecrated Honorius to the See of
Canterbury; and, half a century after his death, there were still
people at Lincoln who remembered their first Apostle well, and
who could describe his slight stoop, his emaciated face, his refined
features, his Roman nose, and though he had been well nigh forty
years in England his Roman black hair, a contrast to the fair-
haired English. His was a presence so they said take him all
in all, inspiring a veneration not unmixed with awe.
Having made good his position both in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire,
St. Paulinus turned northward to evangelise the people of our
modern Northumberland. Here his converts were numbered by
thousands, and when St. Bede wrote a century later the people
still cherished their remembrances of this period of special
Providence. It seems to have been one Lent time that the great wave
of grace swept over the northern country. The now Christian King
Edwin and his queen were spending the time at a royal habitation
in the Cheviots and Paulinus was with them. In all probability
the locality was where now stands the small village of Kirk-Newton in
the northern Cheviots, and where the dedication of the church to St.
Gregory, and the existence of a " Gregory hill " and a " Gregory well,"
all immediately connect the place with the memory of the Pope
who had dispatched St. Paulinus to England. Here, too, local
tradition still points to the spot whereon stood the royal house of
Edwin with the stream flowing in front of the site. At this place in
the far north for six-and-thirty days the Saint devoted his whole
time and energy to instructing and baptising. The people flocked
from far and near to listen to the preaching of the Gospel of Christ,
and from early morning till late evening the Apostle occupied
22 A Short History of
himself without remission in his Christian labours, baptising in the
stream which flowed near the royal residence those whom he had
instructed in the Faith. In Bede's days, as he tells us and he knew
this part of the country well though the royal dwelling had long
been destroyed, the memory of Paulinus' preaching and of the great
harvest of souls he had gathered to the Lord among the simple
people of the northern country, was still fresh and green.
The eight years of Paulinus' work in the North were as full of
fruit as they were of promise, and Pope Honorius endeavoured to
create a metropolitan See at York by sending the pallium of an
Archbishop to him. His plan was Roman. He aimed at estab-
lishing Christian settlements from north to south of eastern
England, which at that time was the seat of the dominant power
in the island. This plan was brought within the range of reali-
sation through the resumption of the preaching of Christianity in
East Anglia now our modern Norfolk and Suffolk by St. Felix
the Burgundian in A.D. 631. Brought over by King Sigebert, on his
return from exile in Gaul, Felix passed, as it were, his missionary
noviciate in Canterbury. At his own earnest request Archbishop
Honorius sent him to resume the work of instructing the peoples
of East Anglia. From Canterbury too, it would appear, Felix
brought teachers and masters for his own monastic school. On
his death, after seventeen energetic and fruitful years of labour
in this portion of the Lord's vineyard, Archbishop Honorius con-
secrated his deacon Thomas, a native-born Englishman, to the vacant
see. Five years later that is, in A.D. 652 upon the death of Bishop
Thomas, the Archbishop raised to the episcopal dignity in his place a
Kentish man, Beretgils, to whom was given the Christian and Roman
name of Boniface. Again, the apostle of Wessex, St. Birinus,
fresh from Italy, sent by the Pope to aid in the harvest field, and
especially directed by him to push forward into the inmost recesses
of the country which had as yet not received the Gospel of Christ,
would naturally turn to Canterbury to confer with his countrymen
there and to remain in close alliance with them.
When Archbishop Honorius died in A.D. 658, for eighteen months
there was no successor chosen, and then the first Archbishop of
English birth was elected, in the person of one Frithona, who took
the name of Deusdedit. By this time, when the Faith was but
the Catholic Church in England 23
beginning, and that with difficulty, to establish itself in East Anglia
and Wessex, and before even the first preachers had been sent into
Mercia by St. Finan of Lindisfarne, Kent had become in fact, as
well as in name, a Christian country. The new generation re-
presented a wholly Christian people. St. Ithamar, the first English-
man to be raised to the Episcopate, had for some years occupied the
see of Eochester, and another, a man of Kent, had just become
Bishop of the East Angles. So great was the progress of the country
in religious observances and in the principles of law that Earconbert,
King Ethelbert's grandson, found himself able, by the very authority
of the law of the State, to impose on all his people the observance
of the forty days' fasting of Lent, enacting severe penalties for
transgressions of this commandment of the Christian Church.
Such was Kent half a century after the coming of our Apostle,
St. Augustine, and his companions. " You," says the Northumbrian
Alcuin, addressing the men of Kent " you are the firstf raits, the
very beginnings of the salvation of the English. In you is the root
and foundation of our Catholic profession ; among you repose those
who in their day were the brightest luminaries of our island, through
whom the day-star of the truth has shone throughout the whole
of Britain."
24 A Short History of
ill
THE CELTIC MISSIONARIES
THE Church founded in Northumbria by St. Paulinus with the help of
St. Edwin, the convert king, quickly suffered great misfortune. In
A.D. 633 the power of the Bretwalda was broken and his kingdom
was ravaged. On October 13th of that year he himself perished in
the battle of Hatfield, which he fought against the combined forces of
Penda, the pagan king of the Mercians, and his ally Cadwallon,
the Christian king of the Britons. Actuated by the old race hatred,
this chief layman of the British Church eclipsed his heathen comrade
in arms by the ferocity with which he attacked the new-made
Christians of Northumbria. "Though he had the name and pro-
fession of a Christian," writes St. Bede, "he was so barbarous in
disposition and behaviour, that he spared neither the female sex
nor the innocent age of children. Nor did he pay any regard to
the Christian religion, which had sprung up amongst them."
The overthrow of Edwin's power was swift and complete, and
it involved the temporary ruin of the new-born Church in North-
umbria. St. Paulinus himself was forced to fly before the ruthless
invaders, and accompanied Queen Ethelburga by sea back to her
old home in Kent. Basso, one of the late King Edwin's chief officials,
also escaped with the royal children, and carried with him to Kent,
as if in proof of the thorough Christian character of Edwin's kingdom,
the great golden cross and the golden chalice, consecrated for use
in the Christian Sacrifice, which in Bede's days were still to be
seen at Canterbury. St. Paulinus never returned to the North. At
the Catholic Church in England 25
the request of Archbishop Honorius, and with the sanction of King
Eadbald, he filled the see of Kochester which was then vacant,
and there he died in A.D. 644.
St. Paulinus' mission in the North came to an end towards the
close of the year A.D. 633. The date is important if we would
understand the true course of events in the history of the
Church in Norfchumbria. For twelve months Penda and Cadwallon
ravaged the dominions, of the late King Edwin. Before the close
of A.D. 634, however, St. Oswald had come out of his exile in
the northern parts of Scotland, and had so beaten back the invaders,
as to be in a position to restore peace and Christian teaching to
the country. To him belongs the glory of continuing and extending
the missions of Paulinus in Northumbria. In his early years St.
Oswald had found a refuge among the northern Picts ; he had there
been instructed in the Faith, and received baptism, at the hands of the
Celtic (Scotic or Irish) monks, who at lona were carrying on the work
begun by St. Columba in those regions. To these friends of his youth
Oswald naturally turned to secure religious teachers for his people,
hoping by their help to consolidate and extend the Christian Church
which Paulinus had founded during the years of his active missionary
work. His purpose was to build on the foundations already laid, even
as in subsequent years he completed and dedicated the stone church
at York, which the Eoman Apostle of the North had commenced.
The new labourers thus called into the vineyard of the Lord
were members of the great Celtic or Irish Church. A few words will
be necessary to understand what this really means. At the coming of
St. Augustine, besides the Britons, there were two other Christian
peoples in this island the Scots and the Picts. Of the first, the Scots,
St. Prosper says that in A.D. 431 many were followers of Christ, and
in that year Pope St. Celestine ordained Palladius and sent him
as bishop " to the Scots who believed in Christ." The real conversion
of the nation, however, was effected, not long before the coming of St.
Augustine to Kent, by St. Columba, the great Irish missionary. In
A.D. 565 that Saint crossed over the sea and settled with his monks
at lona. The Picts of north and east Caledonia were converted
by St. Ninian, who was consecrated their bishop in A.D. 394 by Pope
Siricius. Neither of these two peoples, although engaged in hostilities
with the Saxons, had, like the Britons, that deep racial hatred
26 A Short History of
for them as people who had despoiled them, and still held their
possessions.
Like the British Church, the Celtic Churches differed in certain
points from the discipline of Borne. Like the British Church, too,
these differences did not pertain to the Faith, but to certain
practices to which they had been accustomed from their earliest
teachings, and to which they clung with affectionate pertina-
city. Mainly if the singular abbatial character of the Columban
missionary enterprises be disregarded, as they may, since they had no
place in the subsequent controversies in England the differences
between the Celtic and the Bornan observances may be reduced to
the same as those in which the British and the Roman differed:
namely, the date of Easter and the shape of the clerical tonsure.
Whatever other variations there may have been in rites and prayers,
these are admitted to have been slight, and, to use the words of one
who has made a special study of this subject, it is certain that
" everything proves that Columba and his followers, however they
may have differed in some of their customs from other Churches,
never at any time departed from the Catholic unity in matters of
Faith."
In regard to Rome, and the Pope, and the unity of the Christian
Church the opinion of the Celtic missionaries may be best gauged by
that of St. Columbanus himself. In a letter written after he had
settled at Bobbio in Italy the Saint addresses Pope Boniface as the
' Pastor of pastors." Of himself and his companions he says : " We
are the scholars of SS. Peter and Paul and of all the disciples,
subscribing to the Holy Ghost and to the Divine Canon. All are
Irish, inhabitants of the remotest part of the whole world, receiving
nothing save what is the angelic and Apostolic doctrine. None of us
has been a heretic, none a Jew, none a schismatic ; but the Faith,
just as it was at first delivered by you the successors of the holy
Apostles, is held unshaken. ... I strive to stir thee up as the prince
of leaders, for unto thee belongeth the peril of the whole army of the
Lord. . . . Fearing do I moan unto thee alone, who from among the
princes art the only hope, having authority through the privileges of
the Apostle Peter. . . . We are bound (devincti) unto the Chair of
Peter, for although Rome is great and renowned, through that Chair
alone is she looked on as great and illustrious amongst us. ... On
the Catholic Church in England 27
account of the two Apostles of Christ you are almost celestial, and
Home is the head of the whole world and of the Churches."
It was to these sons of Columba, trained at lona in his spirit, that St.
Oswald of Northuinbria turned in A.D. 634 to obtain religious teachers
for his people. His first attempt did not prove a success. The
prelate sent was a man rigorous and inflexible, who proposed to his
hearers precepts more suitable for the ascetics amongst whom he
had been trained, than for ordinary Christians of the world. In the
short space during which he remained amongst them the people
were not found to respond to his teaching and no wonder 1 He
returned to his monastic home at lona with a report of his failure,
and represented the English as a barbarous, stiff-necked and
intractable race.
It was then that there appeared on the scene one of the most beautiful
of the many beautiful characters that meet us in the pages of St. Bede's
History. St. Aidan comes to us utterly unknown, but portrays himself
completely in the first words he speaks. He had listened to the
report of his brother monk about those obstinate English and, though
discouraged by the account, he could not make up his mind to give
up all hope of a work undertaken for God and the love of souls.
"It seems to me, my father," he said, "that you have been over
rigid with these uninstructed hearers, and, contrary to Apostolic
practice, have not offered them first the milk of milder doctrine, until
little by little, strengthened with the Divine Word, they became
capable of receiving the more perfect counsels and walking in the
higher paths of virtue." In fact, though he knew it not, the heart of
Aidan had felt that the methods of the Roman missionaries in the
field to which St. Oswald had now called the Scotic monks had been
conceived on sound practical lines. They had proceeded on the plan
that these English people must be approached by the way of good
sense and not by that of mere stern precept if the end was to be
attained. Thus in distant lona, perchance without even having
heard their names, the Christian charity animating St. Aidan's soul
already laid the foundation for that respect and affection, which was
to characterise his relations with the Roman monks, when he was
later to come into contact with them and their works, during the
seventeen years of his active missionary life.
By his own words St. Aidan had unwittingly designated himself as
28 A Short History of
the most fit to enter upon the Apostolate in northern England, and
carry on the work which St. Paulinus had so nobly and seriously
begun, and from which he had been compelled by events to retire, so
short a time before. It is pleasant to link in our memories the name
of the Roman Paulinus with tl\at of the Celtic Aidan as their work
was linked in reality. So far from history teaching us to see in the
Roman mission in the South and the Scotic or Irish mission in the
North two hostile camps or rival "communions," plain facts show
two bodies of men animated by one sole desire the desire to
propagate the one Faith of the one Church of Christ. Roman
or Irish, they knew no other. Roman or Irish, they laboured
for no other.
The preaching of the Gospel to the Anglo-Saxon people was, it is
true, divided between the Celtic and the Roman missionaries, and
this being so, it was impossible that there should not be frequent
contact between the two. What was the result ? Whilst the
Britons " held the religion of the English as nothing and would not in
anything communicate with them more than they would with
Pagans," the Romans and the Celts met together and acted together
in a way that proves beyond question that in the beginning there was
no enmity between them. St. Birinus, for example, " who had come
into Britain by the desire of Pope Honorius " made equal use in
preaching the Gospel of Cynigils, king of the West Saxons, whom he
had converted and baptised, and of St. Oswald, King of Northumbria,
the friend of St. Aidan. Though baptised in the Scotic Church and
an undoubted follower of their Celtic customs, St. Oswald stood
godfather to Cynigils on his baptism by the Roman Birinus.
St. Honorius of Canterbury, St. Felix of Dunwich and their
companions, held St. Aidan in deep veneration. It was with
St. Aidan's encouragement that King Oswy sought in marriage
Eanfled, St. Edwin's daughter, who had been educated in Kent. If
she brought with her a chaplain thence and observed Easter accord-
ing to the Roman computation, whilst her husband followed the
Celtic custom, there is nothing ever so slight to indicate that this
was regarded on either side as a breach of " communion," but only
as a legitimate concession to the prejudices of early association and
teaching. James the deacon, St. Paulinus' disciple, never left the
charge committed to him at York. He remained there during the
the Catholic Church in England 29
whole period covered by the Scotic mission till the Synod of Whitby,
when he was succeeded by the Roman priest who had come to the
North as Queen Eanfled's chaplain. Lastly, to take one more example
St. Hilda, Abbess of Whitby, was a convert of St. Paulinus. She
afterwards lived for a year in a convent in the south, and even
wished to pass over into France ; she was, however, recalled to the
north by St. Aidan and made Abbess of Whitby, where in the
celebrated Synod at that place she took the side of the Celtic
customs, but bowed to the final decision.
With the death of St. Aidan, in A.D. 651, we soon begin to feel, as
we read the pages of St. Bede, the existence of a certain tension. It
will be sufficient here to note that the ecclesiastical practices on
which conflicting views arose were the two already named the date
of the Paschal celebration and the shape of the tonsure. The
attentive reader of St. Bede's pages can easily gather, however, that
there were other influences at work. Matters likely to be productive
of dissension not connected with matters of religion, or rather of
religious discipline, were really the efficient causes of the subsequent
troubles.
In A.D. 651 St. Finan succeeded St. Aidan. So far as can be learnt
from our history he experienced no more difficulty than his predecessor.
It was, however, an indiscreet compatriot of theirs, Ronan by name, who
stirred up all the difficulty. He had heard elsewhere about the new
Easter and another tonsure, and had adopted them. Accordingly, full
of his new acquirements, and fired by zeal not tempered by any
discretion, he attacked the aged St. Finan for his adherence to his old
customs customs which the venerable man had been taught in his
childhood at lona, which he reverenced, which he had practised ever
since, and which he had been allowed to observe in peace, without so
much as a remonstrance from those who followed the common
practice taught them by their Roman missionaries. Ronan's vigour
had, it would seem, borne down the opposition of many of his
countrymen, and his attacks had led others at least to inquire. This
measure of success, however, did not satisfy him ; so, paying no heed
to the venerable age and sacred character of his fellow-countryman,
he assailed St. Finan, as St. Bede relates, with violence and ferocity.
The rest was what is to be expected. The old man grew obstinate
under violence and invective, and would then have it that his way
30 A Short History of
alone was right, and that other practices were wrong and should be
prohibited.
It is unnecessary to pursue the course of the controversy which
issued in the Synod of Whitby in A.D. 664. The result was final and
decisive, and it issued in the retirement from Britain of St. Finan's
successor, St. Colman, and his English and Irish friends. This
finally closed the thirty years of Celtic missionary labours in
England. Those of St. Colman' s friends of both races who re-
mained accepted the common Easter and the Roman tonsure.
Amongst them were men whose names are held in the deepest
veneration in the land to this day. It may suffice here to mention
one name only, that of St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne.
The departure of the Celtic missionaries, who were unwilling to
submit to the decisions of Whitby, did not, of course, terminate the
work of the Irish in the formation of the rising Christian Church in
this country ; those who remained behind in England and conformed
themselves to the Roman usages were largely instrumental in con-
Terting and instructing the peoples of the north. Their influence can
be traced in the native art of the north, in the illuminations and in
the writings, for a long period after the Synod of Whitby. Above all
else, they seem to have been destined to foster and consolidate the
devotional life of the English people. To the staid and measured
language which always characterised the prayers of the Roman
Church the Celtic clergy added an element of unction and t^e
happy expression of devotion and fervour which make the prayers of
our Saxon forefathers so useful in stimulating the piety of faithful
souls even of our own times.
Over all, during this period, there presided the spirit of Rome and
the Roman Mission. The historical influence exercised by St. Augus-
tine and his successors in " the making of England " can hardly be
questioned. The historian Green has fully discerned what the genius
of Rome did for the country. " Nothing is more characteristic," he
says, "of Roman Christianity than its administrative organisation.
Its ordered hierarchy of Bishops, priests, and lower clergy, its judicial
and deliberative machinery, its courts and its councils had become a
part of its very existence, and settled with it on every land that it
won. Gregory, as we have seen, had plotted out the yet heathen
Britain into an ordered Church, . . . and though the carrying out of
the Catholic Church in England 31
this scheme in its actual form had proved impossible, yet it was
certain that the first effort of the Roman See, now that the ground
was clear, would be to replace it by some analogous arrangement.
But no such religious organisation could stamp itself on the English
soil without telling on the civil organisation about. The regular
subordination of priest to bishop, of bishop to Primate (and, we
may add, of Primate to Pope) in the administration of the Church
would supply a model on which the civil organisation of the State
would consciously but irresistibly shape itself. The gathering of the
clergy in national Synods would inevitably lead the way to national
gatherings for civil legislation. Above all, if the nation in its spiritual
capacity came to recognise the authority of a single Primate, it would
insensibly be led in its temporal capacity to recognise a single
sovereign. . . . The hopes of such an organisation rested in the
submission of the English States to the Church of Rome."
To some these words may seem far-fetched and exaggerated ; but
without this influence of Rome, making for unification, the welding of
the peoples, and even nations, in this land into the one English folk
might have been indefinitely postponed.
32 A Short History of
IV
THE SAXON CHURCH
THE Synod of Whitby, in A.D. 664, by finally settling all outstanding
differences, made easy the organisation of the Saxon Church as one
united whole. Up to this time it had not been possible to cany out
the plan of St. Gregory, or the later direction of Pope Honorius, for
the ecclesiastical government of the country. The joint action of
two kings, representing the north and the south of the country, was
now a public recognition of the unity of the Church, and an augury
of what ecclesiastical unity afterwards effected in bringing about
national unity.
The See of Canterbury had been vacant for some time, and as no
election had been made in A.D. 667, Oswy, King of Northumbria, and
Egbert of Kent took counsel together on " the state of the English
Church." Although " educated by the Scotch," as St. Bede says,
" Oswy fully understood that the Roman was the Catholic and
Apostolic Church," and felt constrained to try and put an end to the
vacancy in the metropolitical See. As a result of the royal confer-
ence the two kings "agreed to the election and consent of the
Church of the English people," which had nominated a priest of
Canterbury, Wighard, as best fitted to fill the vacant archiepiscopal
chair. The king forthwith sent the elect to Borne with a request
that the Pope would consecrate him as "Archbishop of the English."
This, however, was not to be. Wighard and most of his companions
were carried off by the plague, and Pope Vitalian wrote to say that
he would, as soon as possible, himself choose an Archbishop for the
country.
the Catholic Ch^^rch in England 33
After a brief delay the Pope, in A.D. 668, appointed and conse-
crated St. Theodore as " Archbishop of Britain." The new metro-
politan was a Greek monk, a native of Tarsus in Cilicia, and a man
of the highest culture and integrity. To him the Church in this
country was indebted for the establishment of its schools of learning
and the organisation of its ecclesiastical life on a sound and lasting
basis. The new Archbishop was accompanied upon his journey to
England by Abbot Hadrian, upon whom the Pope's choice had first
fallen, but who had refused the honour, and by St. Benet Biscop,
a Northumbrian noble, who had lately become a monk, and who,
being on a visit to Borne, was induced by the Pope to travel back to
England as their guide. Archbishop Theodore reached Canterbury,
having been considerably delayed, only on May 27, A.D. 669. After
the long vacancy of the See there were naturally many matters to
claim his immediate attention. It was above all things necessary, if
the Church was to be orderly and organised, to establish the diocesan
and parochial system in place of that of the vast and ill-defined
territorial districts, which up to this time had been administered by
the bishops and priests, and to confine the care of each bishop to his
own special diocese.
In some ways circumstances favoured St. Theodore in carrying out
this great and necessary work. A plague had lately carried off great
numbers, including many priests and bishops ; so that on his arrival
the Archbishop found only four bishops in the whole of the country ;
and one of these, Boniface of East Anglia, died shortly afterwards.
As was to be expected, Theodore encountered many difficulties and
much opposition in the prosecution of his design, and some matters
hard to settle he inherited from the chaotic state of affairs which
had existed prior to his arrival. The case of St. Wilfrid was one of
this latter class. Wilfrid was a Northumbrian monk who, having
spent much time in Eome, became a convert from Celtic customs.
He was mainly instrumental in bringing about the settlement of the
disputes at Whitby. Shortly after the Synod he was nominated
Bishop of Lindisfarne, and, as there was then no Archbishop in the
country, he was sent to Gaul for consecration by the kings and
Council at his own request, explicitly for the reason that he would
find there Catholic bishops in communion with the Holy See. It is
also noteworthy that the kings and Council insisted that the elect
c
34 A Short History of
should be one " who would desire to himself embrace the discipline
of the Apostolic See and teach it to others." Wilfrid's absence lasted
so long that another monk, St. Chad, was appointed and consecrated
in his stead, and transferred his See from Lindisfarne to York. On
Wilfrid's return as bishop he 4id not at first insist upon his obvious
rights ; but acquiesced in the appointment of St. Chad and went for
a time to his monastery at Ripon. He then started on a missionary
tour, with the object of securing greater union with Borne. The case,
however, remained unsettled, and St. Theodore finally had to deal with
it. He was not long in coming to a decision, and at once bade St. Chad
resign his See to the rightfully elected bishop, St. Wilfrid. This
St. Chad did at once without question, and he was subsequently
made Bishop of Lichfield by the Archbishop.
It is, of course, impossible here to deal with the question of St.
Wilfrid's Koman appeals. It should, however, be noted that his first
and final restoration to his rights was " by the orders of the Apostolic
See," and "because of the authority of the blessed Pontiffs." His
diocese was, indeed, divided, but the decision was part of the papal
judgment, and the portion Wilfrid received was his own choice.
Moreover, Archbishop Theodore's repentance for his long hostility
to Saint Wilfrid and their complete reconciliation should not be
forgotten.
Besides the great work of bringing order and regularity into the
ecclesiastical government of Britain, which occupied much time and
attention, St. Theodore was also engaged in establishing centres of
learning in the country. He began with the school of Canterbury,
afterwards so celebrated, of which St. Benet Biscop became the
first master, and in which the Archbishop himself taught Sacred
Scripture. Subsequently Biscop founded other monastic schools at
Wearmouth and Jarrow, which the name of Venerable Bede, the
historian of our race, has immortalised by his vast learning and
sound scholarship.
In A.D. 673 Theodore held his first Synod at Hertford. He there
introduced himself as: " I, Theodore, appointed Bishop of Canter-
bury by the Apostolic See." This was recognised by all; and even
Wilfrid, in the midst of the quarrels, fully acknowledged Theodore as
papal representative in England. " I do not dare to accuse him," he
said, " because he is sent by the Apostolic See."
the Catholic Church in England 35
Ten years after Theodore's arrival in Britain, in A.D. 678, Pope
Agatho formally approved of the organisation established by the
Archbishop in the Saxon Church, and confirmed the subdivision of
the large territorial districts into which till this time the land had
been divided. The hierarchy was now to consist of one metropolitan
and eleven suffragans. The year following this, A.D. 679, St. Bede
relates a striking proof of the unity of the Faith, which within three-
quarters of a century from the death of St. Augustine, existed
throughout the entire country, although it was still divided into
several kingdoms. Archbishop Theodore assembled the first Pro-
vincial Synod at Hatfield, and the Abbot of St. Martin's at Rome
attended as the representative of the Pope, having been charged " to
inform himself concerning the faith of the English Church, so as to
give an account thereof on his return to Rome." Pope Agatho
wished to inquire "in Britain, as in other provinces of the Christian
world," whether " the Church was all knit together in the one
Faith." The Archbishop of Canterbury consequently, in the pre-
sence of the papal legate, " inquired into the doctrine of each prelate,
and found all unanimously agreed in the Catholic Faith." A copy of
this unanimous profession of the English Church was given to the
Abbot legate to be carried to Rome, and there, as St. Bede relates,
" it was most thankfully received by the Apostolic Pope and all who
heard it."
Archbishop Theodore died in A.D. 690, having fully accomplished the
work for England which God's Providence had designed. The dis-
position of the English hierarchy under one Archbishop at Canterbury,
which was decreed by Pope Agatho on the advice of St. Theodore,
remained for a long while undisturbed. About A.D. 783, however, the
then Bishop of York, Egbert, was urged by his old master St. Bede
to apply to the Pope to have the original plan of St. Gregory the
Great for a second metropolitan see at York carried out. Two years
later, in A.D. 735, Pope Gregory III. granted the application, sent the
pallium to Egbert and raised York to the rank of the metropolitical
church of a northern province: this disposition of the Church in
England into two provinces practically remained unchanged till the
eve of the Reformation. There was, however, one exception when
for a brief period, more from political motives than to meet any
need of the Church, Ofta, the powerful King of Mercia, obtained the
36 A Short History of
temporary dismemberment of the southern province by the creation
of Lichfield as a third metropolitan see, with the other Mercian sees
as suffragan. This was immediately after the Legatine Councils at
which the legates George and Theophylact received the obedience of
all the English bishops about A.Q. 787, and it was only obtained by the
king, as William of Malmesbury states, after he had " wearied (the
Pope, Adrian) for a long time with plausible assertions." Higbert,
the new metropolitan, was, however, the first and last Archbishop of
Lichfield. A few years later Pope Leo III. was approached by Ethel-
heard, the Archbishop, on the matter, and the English prelates also
represented to the King of Mercia the unjust and impolitic action of
his predecessor in obtaining the division of the Canterbury province.
King Kenulph of Mercia thereupon wrote two letters to the Pope
leaving the decision entirely to his wisdom, since as he said he
"deemed it fitting to have due regard in ail things to St. Peter,
the chief of the Apostles, and to submit with meekness to all
Apostolical Constitutions." He protested that he was " ready even
to lay down his life" for Pope Leo, "for the sake of the Apostolic
office," and declared that "no Christian could presume to run
counter to Leo's Apostolic decisions." Pope Leo's verdict, in
A.D. 802, abolished the privilege of Lichfield and reinstated Canter-
bury as the sole metropolitan see of the south. Writing as to this
decision to King Kenulph the Pontiff says : " We have bestowed
on the Archbishop of Canterbury such a prelateship that if any
of his subjects kings, princes, or peoples transgress his precept
in the Lord, he shall excommunicate the offender till he is
penitent."
To complete the story of this episode in the history of the Anglo-
Saxon Church, it is necessary to refer to the great Council of Clove -
shoe, held a few years later, in A.D. 803. The preamble of its acts
recites that " the Apostolic Pope had sent into Britain an authoritative
precept of his prerogative, commanding the honour of St. Augustine's
see to be restored, with all its dioceses, just as St. Gregory, the
Apostle and master of our race, had arranged." To carry out this
ordinance the assembled prelates, "with the co-operation of God and
the Apostolic Lord, Pope Leo," confirmed the Primacy to Canterbury.
And, moreover, "with the consent and licence of the Apostolic
Lord, Pope Leo," they declared the archiepiscopal dignity, granted
the Catholic Church in England 37
by Pope Adrian toLichfield, to be abrogated " because it was procured
by surreptitious and unfair suggestions."
At the time of this Council of Cloveshoe two centuries had elapsed
since St. Augustine had set foot on English soil. The Church he
came to establish was now fully organised and developed. What the
Faith of this Church was, and how closely it clung to Rome as the
centre of Unity, may be known by an incident recorded as having
taken place in that meeting, at which many nobles as well as bishops
and abbots of the province were present. Ethelheard, the Archbishop
of Canterbury, rising up in the assembly publicly put this question :
" What was the Catholic Faith they held ; what was the Christianity
which they practised ? " " With one voice," we read, " they replied :
1 Be it known to your Paternity that the Faith we hold is that which
was planted hi the beginning by the Holy, Roman and Apostolic See,
under the direction of the most blessed Pope Gregory ; and what
we believe without wavering, we are anxious to practise as far
as we can.' "
In rapidly sketching the growth of the Church in England many
items of great interest in its history have necessarily been passed
over without notice. To make the story of this time at all complete,
or to attempt to give details is obviously impossible within the narrow
limits of these few pages : one or two incidents only can be touched
upon. The name of Archbishop Egbert (735-766) has been already
mentioned as having obtained the pallium for the Church of York.
Besides having been the pupil of St. Bede his chief claim to remem-
brance, is that, under the influence of his master, he established a great
school at York on the model of Canterbury, to which flocked scholars
from Gaul and Germany. From the York school came the celebrated
Alcuin (735-800), the great master mind which directed the revival
of letters under Charlemagne and relit the lamp of learning through-
out the Prankish dominions.
No more certain token of a lively faith can be found in a Church or
a nation than the missionary zeal and enterprise which seeks to carry
the blessings of the Gospel to those still ignorant of it. It is con-
sequently the best proof of the complete Catholic tone and temper
of the Anglo-Saxon Church that, when by the close of the seventh
century it was fully established in the soil of England and in the
hearts of the people, eager missionaries were ready at the peril of
"BRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE
38 A Short History of
their lives to preach Christ Crucified to those who, in the impenetrable
forests of Germany and the inhospitable lands of Northern Europe,
were still buried in the darkness of paganism. Among such glorious
messengers of peace from our race may be named St. Willibrord
(653-739), the Apostle of Frisia, and St. Boniface (680-755), the
Apostle of Germany, with their English companions. What they
achieved in the service of the Gospel and civilisation is written large
on the early pages of German history.
All during the first two centuries that followed the conversion of
our Anglo-Saxon forefathers to the Faith, which may well be called
the golden age of the Saxon Church, the Catholic religion and the
Catholic spirit was ever gaining deeper hold on the minds of the
people and striking stronger roots in their hearts. Churches were built
and beautified. Monasteries and convents, where "the more perfect
way" could be followed and protection was afforded from the rough
surroundings of a young civilisation, sprung up all over the face of
the land. The catalogue of names even of these havens of rest and
peace would be too long to print here, as also would be the list of holy
men and women who were recognised as special servants of God, and
who made this island glorious by their virtues and illustrious in the
annals of the Christian Church. God's call to the cloister was not
confined to the ordinary people, but nobles and even kings and
queens received it and unhesitatingly answered the summons.
Ethelred. King of Mercia, Cenred, who succeeded him, Offa of East
Anglia, and many others exchanged their crowns for the monk's
cowl. St. Edith and numerous other holy nuns were daughters of
kings who preferred the cloister to the palace. Cadwalla resigned
his throne to go to Rome and the tombs of the Apostles ; he died
there a few days after receiving Christian baptism. Ina of Wessex
and his Queen Ethelburga followed Cad walla's example and ended
their days in the Eternal City; and, writes Bede, "in these tunes
numbers of English, nobles and members of the humbler classes,
laity, clergy, men and women vied with each other in journeying to
the limina Apostoloriun, desiring to pass their earthly pilgrimage
near the holy places so as to deserve to be received more lovingly
by the Saints in Heaven." The convents and monasteries established
in England became centres of learning and civilisation, and in the
shelter of their walls were cultivated all the arts of peace. Sculpture,
the Catholic Church in England 39
church building and decoration, painting, embroidery, and above all
the art of multiplying manuscripts and of writing books to which
we who live to-day are indebted for the preservation of ancient
learning, all formed part of the work done in God's cause for
civilisation and progress in the monastic retreats which our Anglo-
Saxon ancestors loved to build to the honour of His name. From
Italy and Gaul, and especially from Rome, pilgrims to the shrines of
the Saints brought back precious volumes of classical and Christian
literature. Wilfrid and Benet Biscop, Theodore and Hadrian, with
Ethelbert of York and Alcuin, are all of them national benefactors in
this regard. Even to-day the influence of the literary treasures
they collected with such labour and preserved with such care may be
traced in our own civilisation.
No feature of the wonderful Anglo-Saxon Church, however, is
perhaps more remarkable than its devotion to Rome and the tombs
of the Apostles. The churches of England were often constructed
after the model of the Roman basilicas ; and frequently in the books
written during this period in England may be seen noted the exact
measurements of the great church of St. Peter and other Roman
sanctuaries. It was to Rome that the steps of pilgrims were turned
in numbers that now seem almost impossible. St. Benet Biscop,
for instance, went five times to the Eternal City, St. Wilfrid three
times or more, in spite of the dangers and difficulties of the road and,
in those days, the terrors of the Alpine passes during the winter
snows. The correspondence of St. Boniface alone proves that in the
eighth century the roads to the Eternal City were well nigh as
frequented by Anglo-Saxon pilgrims of every class and degree
as they are to-day.
Of the religious beliefs and practices and devotions of our Anglo-
Saxon forefathers it is perhaps hardly necessary to speak. They
were essentially what ours are to-day. Their belief in the Eucha-
ristic Sacrifice, as the centre of Christian life and the supreme act of
Christian worship, is evidenced by their churches and their altars and
vestments. Numerous altars were erected in every one of the larger
churches : the Mass was always said in Latin, and it was offered for
the living and the dead. The Saxon Catholics received the Blessed
Sacrament in the Mass under both kinds, but out of Mass, as we do
to-day, in one kind, believing that under the form of bread after Con-
40 A Short History of
secration there was ever really and substantially present the Body,
Blood, Soul, and Divinity of our Saviour Jesus Christ. No belief
is so clearly manifested in Saxon times as that of Purgatory. Our
Saxon forefathers followed many religious customs and devotional
practices founded upon this doctrine : the dying, for example, asked
to be prayed for, the living offered up prayers for the dead and joined
in pious associations with that object. Monasteries and churches
were built where perpetual remembrances in the daily prayers
might be made for the departed friends and relations of the
founder and the Sacrifice of the Mass offered for their souls. The
reverence paid to the consecrated churchyard, which was called
u God's acre," was due to the lively faith of the Saxon Christians
in their certain belief in the Resurrection of the Dead at the day
of the great "doom." Of the devotion of these simple people to the
Angels and Saints there can be no manner of doubt. They prayed
for their intercession and invoked their aid. They loved to depict
them in their paintings and carvings, and in the case of the Saints to
reverence their relics and recall the memory of their life of service
in this world as an encouragement to them to tread in their footsteps.
Above every other English devotion of that time in its intensity and
universality which the Anglo-Saxon people enthusiastically adopted,
next to their worship of the Redeemer, was the veneration of the
Virgin Mother of God. It is impossible to doubt its genuine reality ;
impossible to exaggerate the intensity and childlike confidence with
which Catholic England in Saxon times invoked our Lady and had
recourse with lively faith to her patronage. In a word, turn where
we will in all the memorials of the religious life, literary or artistic,
that have come down to us, the word " Catholic " is written plainly
and indelibly upon every record. Even to understand their language
fulty and to interpret their meaning truly the student must first learn
his lesson in the Catholic Church of to-day.
Unfortunately the glorious religious condition of England during
the eighth century did not continue. The Church, like the country,
had its troubles and difficulties and its time of obscurity. During the
first three-quarters of the ninth century both the one and the other
had to pass through a long period of storm and strife. The Vikings
from Denmark and the north began to gather on the shores of this
island, and gradually the cloud of their depredations spread till
the Catholic Church in England 41
almost the whole country was shrouded in darkness and desolation.
Churches, monasteries, and convents were cast down into the dust,
and heaps of smoking ruins marked the paths of the pagan invaders.
Bishops and priests, monks and nuns, besides the Christian people,
fell victims to the hatred and lust of the Northern pirates in such
numbers, that it must have seemed in those days as if Providence
had destined the land to return once more to paganism. When all
seemed blackest and religion and learning had apparently sunk to the
lowest ebb, God raised up men to effect a regeneration. In regard to
the Church, about which alone we are here concerned, first and fore-
most must undoubtedly be named Duiistan of Glastonbury. What
he did for England and the restoration of religious and ecclesiastical
life can never now be known, though it was well understood at the
time and recognised for generations after in the universal reverence
paid to his name. He found State and Church materially and morally
in ruins, he left it prosperous and organised. As monk and states-
man and archbishop his indomitable energy and his extraordinary
capacities were devoted to the work of restoring the Church of the
English to its ancient glory and at the same time consolidating the
power of the nation. He was assisted in his work by other great
men whose names ought to be remembered with gratitude by all
Englishmen. Such are St. Ethelwold and St. Oswald, not to name
King Edgar, who in every way seconded their efforts for religion and
civilisation.
The labours of St. Dunstan worked wonders, not merely during
his lifetime and for the restoration of the monastic system, but for
the general regeneration of ecclesiastical life. The impetus given,
by his unbounded energy, continued long after he had gone to
his reward. The minsters and churches destroyed by the Danes
were everywhere restored, and the means of again practising the
Christian life and taking part in the Christian worship were afforded
to the people. The new life was manifested by fresh missionary
enterprises, and efforts were made to impart religious instruction
everywhere to the people. For example, in the Canons of Edgar,
which may certainly be attributed to Dunstan, the parochial clergy
are enjoined to preach to their flocks every Sunday, whilst the same
duty was urged upon them by Aelfric, who likewise furnished them, in
his Book of Homilies, with material for their homely discourses,
42 A Short History of
Besides this legislation as to instruction, what are known as the
Canons of Aelfric (A.D. 970), afford us a good deal of insight into the
religious practices of the Saxon Church. The celibacy of the clergy
was strictly enjoined. The four minor and three major Orders
were in existence, and they had to be given by the bishop, who was
likewise to confirm children and consecrate churches with holy
unction. The priest was to offer up the Holy Sacrifice in these
consecrated churches only, and the sacred vestments for Mass
and the cloths for the altars are specially legislated for. The priests
and other sacred ministers were bound to the daily recitation of the
Divine Office in its sevenfold division. The Sacraments were to
be administered to the faithful without fee or charge, and Holy
Viaticum, Extreme Unction, and Confession, are particularly men-
tioned. Finally, to name one more point : the tithes of the
faithful were to be divided into three portions one for the main-
tenance of the Church, another for the poor, and the third for the
support of the priest. All this is confirmed and strengthened by the
" Laws " of A.D. 994, which speak of the care that must be taken to
have the bread and wine for the Eucharist spotless in their cleanness,
and also order water to be mingled with the wine at the Sacrifice.
These laws too, bade people pray to the Saints, and in particular
to Our Blessed Lady, and to make frequent use of the Sign of the
Cross ; to observe Lent in its fasting and abstinence ; to go to Con-
fession at least once in the year, and to Holy Communion each
Sunday during Lent, and frequently at other times in the year;
but always with careful preparation, remembering that it is "the
Communion of the Body and Blood of the Lord."
After St. Dunstan's death, a third Danish invasion afflicted the
country and the Church. A cowardly massacre of the Danes on
St. Brice's day, A.D. 1002, brought the Northmen over in such
numbers that they ultimately set up their own sovereign in England.
From A.D. 1016 to 1042 a Danish dynasty, in the person of Canute
and his two sons, ruled the country with a rod of iron, and the people
were glad to welcome back a king of the Saxon line in the person of
Edward the Confessor. He was virtuous and gentle ; but neither
wise nor strong in his government of the country. Still, under him
there were twenty-four years of peace, and although his foreign
education made him lean upon foreign advisers and appoint them
the Catholic Church in England 43
to place and position in Church and State, the people certainly in after
years looked back to his reign as to a time of happiness ; when
under the iron rule of their Norman masters, they frequently sighed
for "the laws of good King Edward." For his Christian virtues
St. Edward was canonised by popular acclamation, and his shrine at
Westminster quickly became the centre of national devotion.
44 A Short History of
PART II
FROM A.D. 1066 TO THE REFORMATION
V
THE CHURCH UNDER THE NORMAN KINGS
WILLIAM the Conqueror successfully asserted his claim to the English
crown at the Battle of Hastings in A.D. 1066. The modern idea
of national Churches being then wholly unknown, the conquest of
England made of course no change in the religion of the country. By
skilful misrepresentation William had indeed won over the Pope
to his side, and had invested his expedition with something of the
glamour of a holy war undertaken for religion.
In behalf of the Norman contention it had been urged at Home
that Harold had broken his oath, and was thus a public perjurer
to be punished by authority, and probably also, that Stigand, who
then occupied the Chair of Canterbury, had supported Benedict,
the anti-Pope. For these and other reasons Alexander II. was
induced to give his blessing to the invasion, and even to consecrate a
banner to be unfurled when the Norman army set foot in England.
The religious aspect of the undertaking was further suggested in a
vow made by the Conqueror to build an abbey on the site of his
victory ; and Battle Abbey to-day records the fulfilment of his
promise.
Although the Conquest made no difference in religion it caused
a considerable displacement of the bishops and other ecclesiastics
the Catholic Church in England 45
who then ruled the Church in England. No sooner had William I.
made his position secure than at his request the Pope sent over
two Cardinal legates to preside at a Council and deal with some
pressing ecclesiastical business. They arrived early in A.D. 1070>
and convoked a Synod at Winchester for the Eastertide of that
year. Writing to summon St. Wulstan, Bishop of Worcester,
to attend the meeting the legates say that they are holding it
"in behalf of the Lord Pope," since to "the Roman Church belongs
the duty " of watching " over all Christians." St. Wulstan attended
and put in his claim for the restoration of certain property belonging
to his See. The main business of the meeting, however, related to
the case of Archbishop Stigand, against whom certain canonical
offences were charged. The Legates, at the end of the inquiry,
deposed him from his office and declared the metropolitical See
of Canterbury vacant. On leaving England at the conclusion of
their business, the Cardinals took with them to Rome the " pence of
St. Peter," which had been collected and " which of right belonged to
the Apostolic purse."
The case of Stigand was but the first of a long series of depri-
vations of the Saxon prelates. Step by step the Conqueror got rid
of most of the English bishops. St. Wulstan of Worcester, if legend
speaks truly, was saved from expulsion only by a manifestation
of supernatural protection. In the same way the abbots of many
monasteries and other high ecclesiastical officials were made to
resign, or otherwise disposed of, that room might be made for
Normans.
William I. obtained from the Pope the appointment of the great
and devout Lanfranc, one of the most learned ecclesiastics then
living, as Archbishop of Canterbury. He had long been the adviser
of the Conqueror as Abbot of Bee in Normandy, and twenty years
before his elevation to the See of Canterbury he had defended the
Catholic doctrine of the Blessed Sacrament against Berengar of Tours
at a Council in Rome (A.D. 1050). He there with incomparable
learning maintained that by the ministry of the priest the Divine
Power changed the substance of the bread into the substance of Our
Lord's Body, the accidents, or qualities, still remaining. In the
controversy which followed Lanfranc became recognised as the
Catholic champion, and defended the orthodox teaching in several
46 A Short History oj
Councils, besides composing a book upon the subject of Transub-
stantiation.
After first refusing the offer of the Archbishopric of Canterbury,
Lanfranc yielded under pressure as a matter of duty, and coming
over to England was consecrated by the Bishop of London in the
presence of eight other bishops?, on August 29, A.D. 1070. His policy
as primate undoubtedly tended to exalt the Church in this country.
One most important and obvious effect of the Conquest was to bring
the English Church into still closer connection with the Church on the
Continent ; another was to separate the ecclesiastical from the civil
law, to remove the clerical subjects of the king from the jurisdiction
of the ordinary courts of justice and make them subject to their own
ecclesiastical tribunals. All this Lanfranc effected during his
episcopate.
Almost immediately after his own consecration the Archbishop
was called upon to consecrate Thomas of Bayeux to the See of York.
The Archbishop refused to impose hands upon him unless Thomas
would acknowledge the obedience of York to Canterbury. After
some delay, the question was deferred to a suitable occasion and
Lanfranc bestowed the episcopal consecration on this condition.
In A.D. 1071 both Archbishops went to Rome to obtain their
palliuins, and Lanfranc was received with special affection by
Alexander II. as his old master. The case at issue between the
two Archbishops was argued before the Pope, and in the course of
the Archbishop of Canterbury's speech, he took occasion to profess
his belief in the Divine commission to rule the Church bestowed
upon the Roman Pontiffs in the person of St. Peter. "Of truth,"
he said, "it is engrained in the consciences of all Christians
(that Christ) gave nothing less to his successors than He gave to
St. Peter. Hence a dispensation in all ecclesiastical matters is only
valid if it has been approved by the judgment of the successors of
St. Peter."
In a letter also, written at a subsequent date to Pope Gregory VII.,
Lanfranc addresses him as "the revered supreme pastor of the
universal Church," and declares that he " certainly does not question,
and does not think any one questions," that it was "by the
authority of the Apostolic See " that he was raised to the dignity of
Archbishop of Canterbury.
the Catholic Church in England 47
During his tenure of office Archbishop Lanfranc had frequent
recourse to Synods to regulate the affairs of the Church, and to
improve the somewhat chaotic condition in which the rapidity of the
Conquest, and the systematic substitution of foreign ecclesiastics for
the native clergy, had naturally left it. As a monk himself, he dealt
especially with the monasteries, which apparently were the centres of
the old national feeling ; and besides drawing up a set of excellent and
minute Constitutions to regulate Benedictine observance, in numerous
cases he replaced the English superiors by abbots brought from
beyond the seas. The English chronicler, on account of his labours
to improve monastic discipline, calls him "the father and lover
of monks." Although he necessarily placed foreigners in all
ecclesiastical positions, to further the policy of the Conqueror in the
settlement of the country, he quickly assumed the position of an
Englishman, writing of " we English " and " our island." He outlived
William I. and, although reluctantly, crowned William Eufus at
Canterbury on December 26, A.D. 1087. In the rebellion of Odo
Bishop of Bayeux and the Norman lords, the following year,
Lanfranc and his suffragans generally stood by the new King. In
November, A.D. 1088, after the rebellion was stamped out, Lanfranc
attended the King's court at Salisbury for the trial of William de
Saint Calais, Bishop of Durham, who endeavoured to shelter himself
from condemnation under his spiritual character. In the course of the
proceedings the Archbishop drew a clear distinction between the
spiritual position of a bishop and his position as holding temporalities
from the King in his capacity of a Baron, and he implied that the
bishop stood there to be tried not as a bishop, but as one of the King's
tenants-in- chief, and that the bishops, who with others were trying
him, were not doing so as bishops, but as members of the King's
Court.
Lanfranc died on May 24, 1089. He had been seized by a fever at
Canterbury, and his physicians ordered him to take a draught of
medicine ; out of reverence he delayed doing so until after he had
received the Blessed Sacrament, and this is said to have hastened
his end. The Archbishop had spent the revenues of his See with
great munificence. The cathedral church of Canterbury had been
burned in A.D. 1067, and, in seven years from his elevation to the
Archbishopric, Lanfranc had rebuilt it in the Noriuan style. It was
48 A Short History of
cruciform, with two great western towers and a central lantern.
The nave had eight bays, the roof was pointed, and the church was
furnished with a profusion of sacred vestments all his gift. His
example, and in many instances his generosity, caused the erection,
in this and the two following reigns, of numerous majestic churches,
some of which to this day staYid as monuments of the lofty ideas of
their builders, and of the faith of men who would raise such temples,
and who thought nothing too good for the place where the Christian
Sacrifice of the Mass was to be offered to God with due reverence
and solemnity. Many of these churches, of course, have perished,
but those that remain are sufficient to speak of their departed
glory. Such, for example, are St. Albans, the nave and transept
of Ely, portions of Carlisle Cathedral, the great naves of Durham,
Gloucester, Peterborough, Norwich, Tewkesbury Abbey and Waltham
Cross.
During the episcopate of Lanfranc some slight difficulty arose
between the King and the Roman officials as to the punctual pay-
ment of Peter's pence. This annual donation had been made from
the days of King Ina, and before the year A.D. 1000 the Popes had
agreed upon the manner of collection, and a definitely apportioned
sum had been settled for each diocese to contribute. It is clear,
however, that only about one-third of the actual contributions made
by the English people ever found their way to Rome. In A.D. 1074,
Pope Gregory VII. in a letter to King William invited him to see to
the punctual payment of this donation, and tells him "he will find
St. Peter a loving and not unmindful debtor." Two years later,
apparently, the money had still not been paid, for the Pope, in
A.D. 1076, sent his legate Hubert to the King to ask for more exact
payment, and further to suggest that as he, the Conqueror, had in
some measure obtained his kingdom through the Pope, he should
take an oath of fealty to him in temporal matters, as a vassal to his
over-lord, like the heads of some other States who had entered into
this relation with the Holy See. To the second request the King
returned a categorical refusal, saying that he owed no fealty in
temporals to the Pope, but he promised to see to the Peter's pence.
The delay had been caused, he said, by his own absence from England,
when the money had been negligently collected. Some portion of
the arrears then due was sent at once by the hands of the legate,
the Catholic Church in England 49
and William undertook that Archbishop Lanfranc should faithfully
transmit the rest, as soon as it could be obtained from the
collectors.
When Lanfranc died in A.D. 1089 William Bufus began to show
himself in his true character. He kept the See of Canterbury vacant
for more than three years that he might himself enjoy the revenues
with which it was endowed. Other bishops and abbots died, and
he took possession of the lands and endowments of those Sees and
monasteries for the same purpose. It was only after he became
seriously ill that he consented to allow the vacant prelacies to be
filled. For Canterbury the name of the saintly and illustrious
St. Anselm, Lanfranc's successor as Abbot of Bee, was suggested
and met with general approval. The King consented, and sent
for him to England. Anselm complied, but repeatedly refused
the proffered honour, and only upon great importunity at last
gave way and was consecrated at Canterbury on December 4,
A.D. 1093.
From the outset of Anselm's episcopate there were ever-increasing
difficulties and quarrels with the King, who had now recovered his
health and repented of his previous repentance. Matters became
more serious at the end of the first year, when Anselm proposed
to proceed to Rome to receive his pallium from the Pope
" according," as he said, " to the custom of my predecessors."
William demanded to whom he was going, as at that time there
was an anti-Pope ; and upon Anselm's reply that he acknowledged
only Pope Urban, the King declared that he had himself not yet
determined who was the rightful claimant to the papacy, and
would permit no one to anticipate his decision, or acknowledge any
Pope without his leave. In common with the whole Norman
Church, St. Anselm before coining to England had already been
in communion with Pope Urban, and he consequently declared
that " it would be a grave matter to have to deny the Vicar of St.
Peter, and a grave thing to have to break the oath of fidelity made
to the King." In this dilemma a Council was called in March, A.D.
1095, and the opinion of the bishops was asked by the Archbishop,
as to his duty under the circumstances. The suffragans were
unwilling to commit themselves to any policy which might involve
them in difficulties with the King, and refused to give any advice
D
50 A Short History of
at all. St. Anselm thereupon told them that he intended to act
according to his conscience. "I will betake myself to the Chief
Shepherd and Head of all, to the Angel of the great Council, and
will follow the advice which I shall receive from Him in my cause,
yea rather in His cause and that of His Church. In the things
which are God's I will give obedience to the Vicar of the Blessed
Peter, and in things touching the earthly dignity of my lord the
King, I will, to the best of my ability, give him my faithful counsel
and help." As the matter proceeded the position and the issue
became absolutely clear, and St. Anselm refused " to renounce his
obedience to the sovereign pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church,"
at the bidding of the King, as William desired that he should.
This was a matter for the Church to decide, he said, and not for
the State; and in taking this attitude he protested that he did
not in any way violate his allegiance to his earthly sovereign. The
nobles appear to have seen the point at issue even more clearly
than did the bishops, and in reply to William's demand that they
should have nothing to do with Anselm, they said, " He is our
Archbishop ; to him pertains the rule of Christianity in this land,
and in this respect we cannot, whilst we live here as Christians,
refuse his guidance."
The question dragged on for some time without definite settlement.
Meanwhile William had devised a scheme for getting rid of Anselm.
He despatched his envoys to Rome, who in his name and that of
England acknowledged Urban as rightful Pope. They then persuaded
the Pontiff, as they thought, to send the pallium for the Archbishop,
to the King. It was not, however, given into their hands, but Cardinal
Walter, Bishop of Albano, came with the messengers, in order to
bring the sacred insignia of the archiepiscopal office to England with
due honour. On landing, the Cardinal was hurried by the King's
officials to London. He was not allowed to tarry at Canterbury,
or even to speak to St. Anselm, before he had been interviewed
by the King, who had been encouraged by reports from his envoys
to hope that his design had succeeded. The acknowledgment of Urban
as Pope was now ordered by the King to be made throughout the
kingdom, and he then broached his design, asking the legate to
declare St. Anselm deposed from his office, and promising a large
annual subsidy to the Pope if this were granted. The Cardinal,
the Catholic Church in England 51
of course, flatly refused the royal request. Rufus saw that he was
foiled, and at once, making a virtue of necessity, consented to at
least an outward show of reconciliation. Anselm was now
importuned by the King's friends to propitiate William by a
present of money and by declaring his willingness to receive his
pallium from the hands of his sovereign. He refused to do either,
and the King had to content himself as best he might. On
Sunday, June 10, A.D. 1095, the legate brought the pallium in
a silver casket to Canterbury, where he was met near the
Cathedral by St. Anselm barefooted, but vested in full pontificals
and attended by his suffragans. The sacred pledge of his
archiepiscopal jurisdiction, "from the body of St. Peter," was
laid upon the altar from which it was taken by the Archbishop
himself.
It was in this same year, A.D. 1095, that the series of great
expeditions for the recovery of the Holy Land, known as the
Crusades, was initiated by the Pope. At Clermont on November 18,
Urban himself preached on the utility and necessity of this
movement. The hearts of Christians were stirred with a desire
to take part in the glorious work, which the Pope declared a
religious obligation on all. Robert of Normandy, in order to do
his part, mortgaged his dominions to his brother William Rufus,
who to raise the money demanded it of the English clergy. They
in turn were obliged to pledge or to sell many of the most precious
and sacred treasures of their churches.
Two years passed, and the truce between the King and the
Archbishop remained outwardly undisturbed. They were not,
however, altogether years of peace for St. Anselm, because he saw
many things amiss in the state of the Church in England, which
demanded reform and claimed his attention as Archbishop. The
King would listen to no admonition nor would he afford his help,
and so Anselm was powerless. At length he saw that the only
chance lay in an appeal to the Pope, and he demanded the King's
leave to go to Rome. This was curtly refused. He was, moreover,
asked to promise never to appeal to the Pope, and was told that
should he venture to leave England, the King would never again
look on him as Archbishop, and would at once take possession of
the property of his See. Anselm had made up his mind as to his
52 A Short History of
duty, and did not waver. His reply was to the point : " You wish
me to swear never on any account to appeal in England to Blessed
Peter or his Vicar. This, I say, ought not to be the command of
you who are a Christian, for to swear this is to abjure Blessed Peter.
He who abjures Blessed Peter undoubtedly abjures Christ, who
made him prince over His Church." This was at the beginning
of October, A.D. 1097, and by the end of the month the Archbishop
was on his way to Rome.
St. Anselm was received in the Eternal City with every demonstra-
tion of affection by Pope Urban and the Roman Court. He
devoted much time in his enforced idleness to his old studies, and
he composed whilst in exile his celebrated treatise on the Incarna-
tion " Cuv Deus homo ? " He attended several meetings and
Councils in the Eternal City, at which the great reputation he had
for learning, and his sufferings and exile for his duty, gained him an
honourable place and hearing. Nothing, however, was done in the
cause of his appeals except the Pope's proposed excommunication
of William Rufus, which is said to have been hindered at the
Archbishop's own intercession. In July, A.D. 1099, Pope Urban
died ; and on August 2, A.D. 1100, William himself fell in the New
Forest, killed by an arrow from an unknown hand. At the
invitation of the new King, Henry I., Anselm returned at once
to England, which he reached on September 23, A.D. 1100. He was
received by the King with every demonstration of affection, but he
was at once confronted with fresh difficulties. Henry wished him
to do homage for the restitution of the temporalities of the See of
Canterbury, which had now for three years been in the royal hands.
Anselm was pledged to the decrees of the recent Councils at Bari
and Rome, which forbade ecclesiastics to receive investiture from
laymen, or to do homage for their benefices. Henry was unwilling
to surrender the old customs of the kingdom, and St. Anselm,
although he does not seem to have had much real objection to the
customs in question, was bound by his obedience to the Holy See.
The matter remained unsettled for some considerable time. Envoys
were despatched to the Pope to endeavour to get some relaxation
of the decrees, but in regard to the investiture of prelates with ring
and staff, the Holy See was rightly inflexible, although for a time
a false report as to the Pope's willingness to concede this
the Catholic Church in England 53
was believed, even by St. Anselm. Finally the matter of homage
was decided in favour of the King by Pope Paschal, and on August 1,
A.D. 1107, in a large assembly held in London, Henry in his turn
gave way upon the matter of investiture, and it was decreed that
henceforth the ring and staff, symbols of spiritual jurisdiction,
should be bestowed only by spiritual authority, but that for the
bestowal of temporalities ecclesiastics should do homage to their
sovereign as temporal lord. Two years later St. Anselm's troubles
were ended. He died at Canterbury, April 21, 1109. For five
years after this Henry I. kept the See of Canterbury vacant, and
it was not till May 17, A.D. 1114, that a successor was appointed
in the person of Ealph d'Escures. He concerned himself greatly
with maintaining the dignity of the Archbishopric of Canterbury, and
he wrote a long letter to Pope Calixtus on the subject, addressing
him as " his Eight Reverend and only Lord, supreme Pontiff of the
Universal, Holy, and Apostolic Church of Rome."
During the troubles of St. Anselm's episcopate it had been difficult
to pay much attention to the discipline of the Church. After his
return in A.D. 1100, however, there was vigorous legislation as to the
suppression of married clergy with a view to stamping out that abuse
of the ecclesiastical canons. In A.D. 1138 Albericus, Bishop of Ostia,
and legate of Pope Innocent II., held a Synod at Westminster, and
the provisions of the meeting are of interest, as manifesting the
Catholic practices in use. For example, we have evidence of the use
of the holy oil of Chrism, and of Baptismal oil, of the Sacrament of
Extreme Unction, of the Sacrament of Penance, of the Holy Mass, of
Holy Communion. There is legislation for the reservation of the
Blessed Sacrament and for the reverence with which it was to be
carried to the sick ; for the erection of private oratories ; for the
consecration of bishops, the blessing of abbots, and for the reception
of the Sacrament of Orders ; for the reservation of cases for absolution
to the Roman Pontiff, &c.
When this Synod was held the Archbishopric of Canterbury was
vacant, but the following year, A.D. 1139, for the third time an Abbot
of Bee was chosen to the See in the person of Theobald. All during
the reign of Stephen the Church, like the nation, had experienced
the utmost depth of misery. Towards both the King acted as a
despot ; and he was only restrained by his wars from indulging in all
54 A Short History of
the tastes of a tyrant. It was now that under Archbishop Theobald's
guidance the Church saved the nation. "England," says Green on
Stephen's reign, " was rescued from this chaos by the efforts of the
Church."
the Catholic Church in England 55
VI
THE CHURCH DURING THE PLANTAGENET RULE
WHEN Stephen died in 1154 Archbishop Theobald and others were
sent to Henry Plantagenet, then in Normandy, to request him to
take the crown. Henry was the grandson of Henry I., being the son
of his daughter Matilda and Geoffrey of Anjou. On December 19,
A.D. 1154, he arrived in England and was at once " unanimously
elected king, and anointed" by the Archbishop.
At first the dispositions of Henry II. towards the Church appear to
have been all that could be desired, and in these peaceful years it was
given a brief period for reorganisation, which was not unnecessary
after the turbulent reign of Stephen. Soon, however, there were signs
of difficulties between Church and State, and under Archbishop
Theobald's successor these came to a climax in the great quarrel
in regard to the limits of the royal and ecclesiastical jurisdictions.
In A.D. 1157 the point was raised in a somewhat curious way. The
Abbot of Battle claimed to be exempt from the jurisdiction of his
Ordinary, the Bishop of Chichester, and based his claim upon the
grant of William the Conqueror at the foundation of the Abbey.
This exemption had been admitted as valid by previous holders of the
See of Chichester ; but was now denied by Bishop Hilary. Into the
details of the case it is unnecessary to enter : the interesting point was
raised by the bishop in a meeting held at Chichester in A.D. 1157 to
settle the question. The King, Archbishop Theobald and the other
bishops, as well as many of the nobles, were present, when the Bishop
of Chichester stated what he held to be Catholic teaching as to the
jurisdiction of the Church and its extent.
In the course of a long speech he pointed out that " Our Lord left
56 A Short History of
two powers in the world, the spiritual and the material." The
spiritual He conferred " on the first pastor, that is, on St. Peter the
Apostle, and all his disciples and successors." Hence from the
beginning " the custom was implanted in the Church of God that the
pastors of the holy church of the said Saint Peter, Prince of
the Apostles, should rightly^ govern, as being vicars of the holy
Church of God." Hence also " the Roman Church, endowed by the
apostleship of the said Prince of the Apostles, throughout the length
and breadth of the world had obtained so high and great a dignity as
chief, so that no ecclesiastic can be deposed without his judgment
and authority." Further that " in this way the Church was
constituted from the earliest time that " without the permission or
confirmation of the said Father (the Pope) it is not lawful for any
" lay person, not even a king, to bestow ecclesiastical dignities, or
grant ecclesiastical privileges to churches."
In the event, the bishop was compelled to withdraw his claim.
Curiously enough, however, one of those who appear to have been
against him in his contention, and who was present at the meeting at
Chichester, was the King's chancellor, Thomas Becket, who sub-
sequently as Archbishop was compelled to raise much the same
question, and even to sacrifice his life in the quarrel. Archbishop
Theobald died in April, A.D. 1161, " hoping and praying " that Thomas
the Chancellor would succeed him at Canterbury. The See remained
vacant for nearly a year, and Becket was unwilling to accept the
office to which Henry II. had designated him, avowedly because he
foresaw that the King's ecclesiastical policy would inevitably clash
with his own obvious duty to the Church as Archbishop. The King,
however, insisted ; the Canterbury monks elected him, and he was
consecrated by Henry de Blois, Bishop of Winchester, on June 3,
A.D. 1162, having been ordained priest the previous day. At the
King's request Thomas was allowed by the Pope to send for his
pallium, instead of going to Eome in person to fetch it. Although
the life of the new Archbishop had always been pious and pure, his
consecration at once worked a great change in him. He became
forthwith most zealously devout and studious, adopted an austere
and penitential mode of life, and threw himself into the work of his
ecclesiastical office with that ardour which had characterised all his
service of the King.
the Catholic C/iurck in England 57
His fears, that his duty to conscience would interfere with his
friendship to Henry, became quickly realised. Within a year from
his appointment he had felt it incumbent upon him to oppose a
proposition made by Henry on a mere matter of State administration,
but on the ground that it was inconsistent with the plain principles of
justice. This was the beginning ; the royal irritation was increased
by St. Thomas' persistent efforts to recover all alienated property of
his See, even that which was in the possession of the Crown.
The main contest, however, was upon a very simple issue. William
the Conqueror's ecclesiastical courts had been set up for the distinct
purpose of withdrawing clerics from the ordinary or civil courts.
Henry saw in this a limitation of the royal power, and in the course of
A.D. 1163 he made several attempts through his justiciars to assert
his royal jurisdiction over clerks accused of crime. In each of these
attempts he was defeated by the legal objections interposed by St.
Thomas. The position of the Archbishop was clear; consistently
with his duty he could not allow the clergy to be deprived of a
privilege which had been conceded for a century. He could not
surrender the right, for to do so would place the Church again under
the domination of the secular power, from which Popes and bishops
had persistently striven to emancipate it.
Henry made the first move in the struggle. On October 1, A.D.
1163, he summoned the bishops into his presence. He bade them
sign their approval of "his grandfather's customs," and in particular
of two articles, which dealt with the respective functions of Church
and State, in the case of clerks accused of crime. The bishops
agreed to do what Henry demanded of them, with the covering clause
" saving our order" ; but the Archbishop absolutely refused to agree
to the two clauses, to which the King particularly desired his assent.
Reprisals followed ; nor were matters improved by a personal
interview with the King at Northampton. In December, however, it
was intimated to Becket, falsely as it afterwards appeared, that the
Pope wished him to give way to Henry, who on his part would really
be content with the appearance of victory. Upon this the Archbishop
privately agreed to abide by " the customs of the realm " loyally and
in good faith. When, however, he was required to repeat this
publicly, at a Council summoned for the purpose at Clarendon, on
January 13, A.D. 1164, he had found out that he had been deceived ;
58 A Short History of
the Pope had expressed no such desire. He consequently not only
refused to sign the sixteen propositions, known as the Constitutions
of Clarendon, declaring them all to be contrary to the law of the
Church ; but, in his penitence at having given way even so far as he
had done, though it had been in error, he abstained from saying
Mass until he had obtained absolution from the Pope. Some unsuc-
cessful negotiations followed, and St. Thomas made two attempts to
leave the country.
In October the same year, at a Council held at Northampton, on
some trumped-up charges, St. Thomas was declared guilty of high
treason. The bishops, though they would not support him in his
hour of need, refused to take part in this sentence against him. That
night Thomas fled from Northampton, escaped over the sea to France,
and went at once to throw himself at the feet of Pope Alexander III.,
who was then at Sens. The Pontiff naturally upheld Becket in his
refusal to sign away the liberties of the Church ; but his decision did
not, of course, end the quarrel. Six years of fruitless negotiations
followed. St. Thomas spent these in exile, and more than once
during that time, it almost seemed as if, to avoid the schism into
which Henry appeared to be dragging the Church in England, Pope
Alexander would give way, and compromise the cause for which the
Archbishop was contending.
During this time St. Thomas, in writing to one of the English
bishops, states quite clearly what the Catholic teaching then was about
obedience to the Roman See. "Who doubts," he writes, " that the
Roman Church is the head of all the Churches and the source of
Christian doctrine ? Who is ignorant that to Peter were given the
keys of the kingdom of heaven ? In the faith and teaching of Peter
doth not the structure of the whole Church rise until we all attain in
Christ unto the perfect man, unto the unity of faith and the know-
ledge of the Son of God ? . . . Whosoever he be who waters or who
plants, God giveth to no one increase save to him who shall plant in
the faith of Peter and acquiesce in his teaching."
In A.D. 1170, mainly by the influence of Louis VII, of France, a
reconciliation between the King and the Archbishop was effected.
The Pope urged St. Thomas to return as quickly as possible to his
diocese, which had been so long without a pastor. This he did at
once, and he was received by the people with every manifestation of
the Catholic Chiirch tn England 59
joy. His entry into his cathedral city of Canterbury was like a
triumphal procession. The King's good dispositions were, however,
of brief duration. His mind was poisoned against the Archbishop,
and a hasty expression he allowed to drop from his lips sealed
St. Thomas's fate. In less than a month from the Archbishop's
landing in England, on December 29, A.D. 1170, he had received
the martyr's crown at the altar of St. Benedict, in his own
cathedral.
So wonderful were the miracles which immediately attested the
sanctity of the martyred Archbishop, that even before the election of
his successor, he had been canonised. At once he became the
patron of the English Church, which for the next three centuries
looked upon him as her pride and glory, and as the champion of her
liberties. The whole Christian world enriched his tomb at Canter-
bury with their offerings, till it became, even for its very magnificence,
one of the great sights of the Western world. Before the martyr's
shrine King Henry did public penance, and in A.D. 1172 was absolved
by the Pope for his part in the tragedy. The Saint, even by his
death, had won the battle. The Constitutions of Clarendon became
a dead letter, and as long as England remained Catholic, ecclesiastics
preserved the liberties for which St. Thomas had fought the good
fight even unto death.
The remainder of the reign of Henry II. and that of King Richard I.
call for little remark, so far as the story of the Church in England is
concerned. Archbishop Richard, who succeeded St. Thomas, was
apparently a wise and prudent ruler. Very shortly after his accession
in A.D. 1175 he celebrated a Provincial Synod at Westminster, in which
stringent provisions were enacted to secure the better observance of
the laws of clerical celibacy. Clerics in Minor Orders who had
taken to themselves wives were to be prohibited from ever holding
any benefice ; subdeacons, deacons and priests were to be ordered to
separate from the women they called their wives under grave
penalties, since by the Canons of the Church they were incapable of
marriage. The following year, A.D. 1176, at the request of King
Henry II., the Pope sent Cardinal Hugo as his legate into England to
settle various matters of business. As papal legate the Cardinal
summoned a Synod of both Provinces to meet him at Westminster.
At this meeting he presided in the Pope's name, and endeavoured,
60 A Short History of
but with little success, to settle the long-standing quarrel, between
the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, as to precedence.
In the reign of King Richard, the Third Crusade, in which he joined,
had its effect upon the Church of this country. To obtain the
necessary funds for the expedition, and subsequently for the King's
ransom, the taxation of ecclesiastics was increased to such an extent
that the sacred plate had to be pledged or sold. From A.D. 1193 until
A.D. 1205 the Church of Canterbury was ruled by Hubert Walter,
who had previously been Bishop of Salisbury. Besides being a great
ecclesiastic, Archbishop Walter was one of the most eminent of
the many great Churchmen who all during this period had the
administration of English State affairs in their hands. Though their
ecclesiastical duties must undoubtedly have somewhat suffered by
their secular occupations, they not only secured some measure of
justice and safety to the people in what would otherwise have
been lawless times, but they contributed greatly as statesmen to
the making of England.
Archbishop Hubert Walter was a man of more than ordinary
energy. In A.D. 1195 he was in the north of England making a
visitation of the monasteries and of the Northern Province generally
as " legate of the Pope." He legislated in a Synod held at York on
matters concerning clerical life, being careful to declare that "in
everything he desired to safeguard the authority and dignity of the
most Holy Roman See." The provisions of this Synod are of great
interest as manifesting the extreme care and reverence which the
English Church had for the Blessed Sacrament. The law of the
Church as to the mixed chalice ; the care taken to preserve the Canon
of the " Sacrifice of the Mass" from even verbal changes, however
slight ; provisions as to the reservation of the Blessed Sacrament,
which out of reverence was to be changed each week ; the honour
with which it was to be carried to the sick for their Viaticum, &c., are
all summed up by Archbishop Hubert in the words : " Let the Blessed
Sacrament be consecrated with humility, received with fear, and
dispensed (to the faithful) with all reverence." A similar Synod was
held in London in A.D. 1200 by the same Archbishop, in which the
legislation as to the Eucharist and the other Sacraments, as well as
to the Divine Office to be said by priests, is equally clear and edifying.
It is useful to see by this that, even in the general chaos of King
the Catholic Church in England 61
John's reign, the Church authorities did not relax their efforts to
maintain a proper standard of discipline.
The name of one great bishop and saint should be mentioned as
having lived at this time that of St. Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln. The
influence of his upright character and devout life was felt by the
nation at a time when such an example was much needed. He was
fearless in doing his duty. When Henry II. desired him to bestow a
prebend at Lincoln on one whom the bishop considered unworthy, he
flatly refused the royal request. He successfully withstood King
Richard, in what he considered an unjust taxation proposed to be
levied on the people. When he died, on November 24, A.D. 1200,
he was borne in what was really a procession of triumph to his tomb
in Lincoln Cathedral, King John himself being one of the bearers of
the bier.
The reign of John brought great trouble to the Church in England.
Hubert Walter, the Archbishop of Canterbury, died in A.D. 1205 and
grave difficulties arose about the choice of a successor. The monks
first elected their sub-prior, and then a nominee of the King. Pope
Innocent III. rejected both candidates and bade the monks choose
Stephen Langton, an Englishman and at that time a Cardinal in
Rome, one of the best, most learned and upright ecclesiastics of
the day. This they did at once and in Rome, without referring to the
King for leave to elect as was customary, and thereupon the Pope
immediately consecrated him on June 17, A.D. 1207. King John
was furious and declared that he would never receive Langton as
Archbishop, or allow him to set foot in England. In this disposition
he remained for several years. The country meanwhile experienced
all the horrors of an Interdict. John himself was excommunicated by
the Pope ; was declared deposed from his rule over the kingdom
and the King of France was invited to carry out the sentence. At
the last moment, however, John submitted himself fully and entirely
to the Pope. In July, A.D. 1213, in the presence of a papal legate, he
surrendered his kingdom into the Pope's hands and received his
crown again from the Pope's representative as a vassal from his
suzerain lord. He further bound himself and his successors by oath
to hold England as a fief of the Roman See and to pay a yearly
tribute to the papacy for his kingdom.
It was not till this had been done that Cardinal Langton at last
62 A Short History of
came over to England and took possession of his See, six years after
his election. He at once became the leader of the nobles and people
in their fight for freedom against the tyranny and lawlessness of John,
who broke every promise and violated every oath. At length, guided
by Langton, the Barons forced him, in A.D. 1215, to grant the Great
Charter. This, however, was net to be the end of the struggle. John
appealed to the Pope against his subjects; and the Pope, on the ground
that as suzerain he ought to have been consulted before his vassal
could be bound by any oath respecting the government of the kingdom,
declared Magna CJiarta null and void. The country now experienced
all the horrors of civil war. The Barons invited Louis of France to
come over to England and take the crown from one whose word they
could not trust, and John asked and obtained from the Pope a legate
to protect him. Success, however, favoured the party of the Barons ;
but fortunately for the kingdom John died on October 12, 1216.
Henry III., the son of King John, was only nine years of age at the
time of his father's death. He owed his succession, as he frequently
in subsequent years acknowledged, to the Pope and the papal legate
Gualo. During the long reign of this sovereign many issues of great
importance were raised in regard to the Church in this country.
Frequent nuncios and legates visited England on papal and royal
business. As often as not they were asked for by Henry himself,
who was in frequent disagreement with the Archbishops and bishops
of England, not only upon ecclesiastical matters, but in regard to the
constant royal repudiations of promises and obligations. The Church
in England was the champion of English liberties and assisted the
nobles and people in their endeavour to prevent Henry from re-
pudiating the charters he had granted and had sworn to respect, by
ecclesiastical censures and solemn excommunications.
The action of the papal legates and the Popes themselves during
this period has been frequently condemned by historians. It was
a time of great difficulty and trouble for the papacy. On the one
hand the Popes were straining every nerve to break the power of the
Mahometans by means of the various Crusades they initiated, and
for which Europe is so greatly indebted to them, and on the other
they were involved in a long and exhausting struggle with the
Emperor. The Koman Pontiffs were in grievous need of money, and
of the means to reward the services of their faithful adherents.
the Catholic Church in England 63
Under these circumstances they had recourse not merely to a taxation
of ecclesiastical revenues throughout the Christian world, but to the
appointment of Roman and Italian ecclesiastics to benefices in
England and elsewhere. In England these were known as papal
subsidies and papal provisions. However much necessity may excuse
these demands, they were condemned as detrimental to the best
interests of religion by the ecclesiastics of France as well as by those of
England, whose complete loyalty to the Papacy cannot be questioned.
Chief among the great English Churchmen of this period there may
be mentioned the name of St. Edmund, Archbishop of Canterbury, a
learned and saintly prelate. His episcopate was one long period of
strife and contention, and, like St. Thomas Becket, he fled from
England and died in exile. Another bishop, who occupied a great
position for his learning, piety, and fearless determination to do his
duty at all costs, was Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln. This
time, too, saw the rise of the great Mendicant Orders. It is difficult
to say which is more remarkable, the rapidity of the development of
the Franciscan and Dominican friars, or the great position both in
the Church and the world to which they so quickly attained in the
first half century after the deaths of their sainted founders.
It was during the time of the Plantagenets, and strangely enough
during the reign of King John, that our English Universities began
to be renowned as schools of learning, and students commenced to
come to them from other countries. This was entirely due to the
action of the Church, and mainly to the personal work of such
Churchmen as St. Edmund of Canterbury and Bishop Grosseteste of
Lincoln ; whilst their efforts were seconded by the Franciscan and
Dominican teachers, who soon gained a European reputation.
Bishop Grosseteste's opinion upon the position of the Church in
regard to the Supremacy of the Roman Pontiff may be here recorded,
since his attitude in regard to certain abuses has been so frequently
misunderstood and misrepresented. In the very same letter written
to the Pope's official not, be it remembered, to the Pope himself in
which in strong language he objects to a papal nominee for a Lincoln
prebend, he declares that to " the most Holy Apostolic See all power
has been entrusted for edification, not destruction, by the Holy of
Holies, our Lord Jesus Christ." Moreover, in another letter he puts
the matter even more clearly, declaring that " to the Holy Roman
64 A Short History of
Church is due from every son of the Church the most devoted
obedience, the most reverential veneration, the most fervent love,
the most submissive fear." ..." When the sun himself appears and
shows his presence upon the earth, the lesser luminaries give place
to the rays of the sun, being extinguished by the solar light : so does
our Lord the Pope manifest his presence ; for in comparison to him
all other prelates are like the moon and stars, receiving from him
whatever power they possess to illuminate and cherish the Church."
the Catholic Church in England 65
VII
THE CLOSE OF THE MIDDLE AGES
IT is, of course, possible here to treat of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries only very briefly. Some matters, however, of importance
and interest in the History of the Church during this period require
consideration. Before the close of the thirteenth century Edward I.
had come into serious collision with the English ecclesiastical authori-
ties about money matters. All during the latter part of Henry III.'s
reign constant demands were made upon English Church revenues
both by the Pope and the King. The Pope was often assisted by
royal authority to obtain the subsidy he desired, and the King in
turn frequently asked that papal pressure should be put on his ecclesi-
astical subjects, to induce them to assist him out of the revenues of
their benefices. It was only another step for the Sovereign to claim
his tenth or fifteenth from Church property as a right, not requiring
the Pope's authorisation or dispensation. This is exactly what did
happen in A.D. 1295, only that Edward I. demanded a third, or at
least a fourth part, of all Church revenues. He had recently employed
papal authority to extract from English ecclesiastics certain payments
for the Holy War, and now, under the guidance of Archbishop
Winchelsea, the clergy invoked the same authority to prevent what
they regarded as wholesale spoliation. At their request Pope
Boniface VIII. published a Bull forbidding the clergy of any Christian
country to grant away the revenues of their churches without per-
mission of the Holy See. Upon this prohibition the English clergy
took their stand ; and in January, A.D. 1297, the Archbishop of Can-
terbury publicly declared their inability to do what Edward desired.
" Under Almighty God," he said, " wehave two lords theone spiritual,
66 A Short History of
the other temporal. Obedience is due to both, but more to the
spiritual." He then offered to send messengers to consult the Pope
and if possible to obtain the required dispensation. This King
Edward refused and proclaimed the entire body of clergy outlawed.
Churchmen were thus entirely and suddenly placed at the King's
mercy. As outlaws they could not appeal for justice to any court
nor claim protection from the law for any injury. The northern
clergy at once gave way ; but as in the Province of Canterbury there
was hesitation, the King's officials promptly took possession of all
ecclesiastical property, and Edward intimated that should the clergy
not now agree to give what he asked, he would keep as much as he
pleased. They at once capitulated, Archbishop Winchelsea alone
remaining inflexible. He retired with one chaplain to a small par-
sonage, and subsequently departed from England. When Edward I.
died he was still living in exile abroad.
Under Edward III. the secular policy of the Crown was obviously
hostile to that of the Holy See in some respects. This, however, in
no way interfered with the full loyalty of both Sovereign and people
to the Pope in all religious matters. The differences, where they
existed, had regard merely to the authority claimed by the Popes
over the ecclesiastical property of the country, and on this ground
they not unfrequently asserted a right to bestow benefices at their
will and pleasure. This matter has obviously nothing to do with the
spiritual jurisdiction of the Roman Pontiffs. In these disputes this
was not only never called in question, but was constantly being
reaffirmed as part of the faith, or at least of the practice, of Christian
nations. In A.D. 1351 and A.D. 1353 the celebrated statutes of
Provisors and Prcemunire were carried by the English Parliament
in spite of the opposition of the bishops. The former statute forbade
the introduction into thp country of such Papal Bulls as dealt with
" Provisions," or the bestowal of any English benefice or cure upon a
papal nominee. In the first instance this law was mainly directed
against the holding of English benefices by foreigners. The second,
or " Statute of Prsemunire," threatened with imprisonment, forfeiture
of goods and other penalties, any one who should accept from the
Holy See any "provision" to a benefice in England. This had, of
course, nothing whatsoever to do with the normal authority of the
Holy See in confirming to bishoprics, &c,
the Catholic Ch^lrch in England 67
This statute of Praernunire, however, in reality amounted only to a
national protest against alleged trespasses upon the Koyal authority
in civil matters. By its terms it is made penal for any suit to be
"drawn out of the kingdom, to answer of things whereof the cogni-
sance pertains to the King's Court." From the first its provisions
were never construed against Papal appointment to bishoprics. Every
vacancy of any English See continued to be filled after the passing
of the Act as before in the normal way, by papal provision. In most
cases the King connived at the appointment and wrote letters suppli-
catory to the Pope asking him to appoint " out of the plenitude of his
power." All translations of bishops were also made on the same
lines. Some of these papal provisions, however, were carried out in
spite of the King, as in the case of Eochester in 1389, of Carlisle in
1396, and others about the same time. In 1406 the Pope provided
Bishop Tottington to Norwich in spite of the royal disapproval, the
King yielding in the end and giving the temporalities. In fact, within
six months of the passing of the Act two of the principal Sees in
England had been filled up by papal " provision." Later on,
Edward III. went to Bruges and met the papal commissioners and
made what appears to have been a treaty with them. Here, although
a modification in practice was promised, the right of the Pope to
provide in given cases was conceded. Even in regard to ordinary
benefices there is evidence to show that the right of papal provision,
though in practice much restricted, continued in fact to be acknow-
ledged, or at least conceded.
Fifty years' experience showed that the statute of Provisors had
operated to the great detriment of learning, and in A.D. 1399 both Uni-
versities petitioned Convocation to find some remedy. They pointed
out that whilst the Popes were allowed to confer benefices by pro-
vision, the choice had always fallen upon men of talents and industry,
who had obtained degrees in the Universities. The effect of this pre-
ference had been to multiply the number of students and quicken the
national desire to obtain University degrees. The " Statute of Pro-
visors " had put an end to this, and the schools at the time of the
petition were almost abandoned. In A.D. 1416 the matter attracted
the attention of Parliament, and the Commons petitioned the King
for the abolition of the statute and for leave to be granted for the
Pope to revive the practice of " providing" to English benefices.
68 A Short History of
That these laws against "provisions" were not, and were not in-
tended to be, detrimental to the spiritual prerogatives of the Pope is
absolutely certain. The great theological teacher at Oxford during
the fourteenth century, for instance, was the celebrated Duns Scotus,
and his works were the standard authorities at our Universities until
the religious changes of the sixteenth century. His opinion on the
position of the Pope in the Church may be taken, therefore, as repre-
senting English teaching on the matter. In one of his tracts, whilst
discussing a question relating to Baptism, he has occasion to refer to
the teaching of Innocent III., and he there says : "It is of faith
that the ever Holy Roman Church, which is the pillar and ground of
all truth and against which the gates of hell cannot prevail, admits
no error and teaches the truth. . . . Hence they are excommunicated
as heretics who teach or hold anything different from what She
teaches and practises."
If this was the doctrine of the schools, the Supremacy of the Pope
was no less clearly maintained by English constitutional law. Justice
Bracton (a priest), who lived in the middle of the thirteenth century,
was chiefly renowned for his great work upon The Laws and Con-
stitutions of England, which was the standard authority on legal
matters for centuries. He did not, of course, deal with ecclesiastical
law directly, and so had little occasion to speak specifically of the
Pope's authority ; but incidentally he says : " Concerning the juris-
diction of superior and inferior courts, it is to be noted that in the
first place, as the Lord Pope has ordinary jurisdiction over all in
spirituals, so the King has in this realm in temporals." Further :
" To the Pope and the priesthood belong spiritual things ; to the King
and the kingdom temporal things, as it is written, 'the heaven of
heavens is the Lord's, but the earth He has given to the children of
men.' Hence the Pope has nothing to do with the dispensation of
temporal affairs, any more than kings and princes have with spiritual,
lest either should put his sickle into the other's harvest. And as the
Pope can ordain in the spiritual sphere concerning orders and digni-
ties, so also can the King in temporals concerning grants of inheri-
tance and assignment of heirs."
In A.D. 1349, England, in common with other countries, suffered
from the most terrible scourge of pestilence which has probably ever
fallen on the world. It has become known in these days as " The
the Catholic Church in England 69
Black Death," and during the few months its ravages scourged
England it carried off fully one-half of the inhabitants. The clergy
were everywhere devoted to their duty, and they perished at their
posts in such numbers that it became impossible to fill the vacancies
caused by the sickness. Many churches long remained unserved ;
some were never again used. In the religious houses the mortality
was not less. In some, religious life was wholly destroyed, and in
most the depletion of numbers was so great that they never afterwards
recovered. To fill up vacancies in parish churches, young and inex-
perienced, and of course unlearned clerics were quickly ordained, and
ecclesiastical discipline and religious teaching must have suffered
considerably. One curious result, which apparently can be traced
to the social changes caused by this great pestilence was a general
dearth of candidates for the sacred ministry among the well-to-do class.
Before this time the cleric, who was ordained upon his own patrimony,
as we should say to-day, or whose family found him a " title " that is,
assured him the means of living respectably until he could obtain a
competent benefice very frequently comes up for ordination. During
the second half of the fourteenth century and the whole of the
fifteenth this class of candidate is much more rare, and the monas-
teries now ifurnish the greater number of candidates for Ordination,
even to the ranks of the secular priesthood, and give them the
necessary "title." These clerics had probably been educated in the
monastic schools and were secured a "title" and otherwise assisted
to enter the ranks of the parochial clergy by the religious Orders.
Before the close of the fourteenth century the orthodoxy of
the Church in England was troubled by the teachings of an
Oxford professor named Wyclif. Whatever may have been the
cause, the fact seems certain that Wyclif, a very able and learned
ecclesiastic, was embittered in early life against the Pope and the
Kornan Curia. This soon developed into a spirit of bitter discontent
against the management of ecclesiastical affairs generally, and against
the Pope, the religious, and the friars in particular. In much of
this he had at first the support of John of Gaunt, the son of
Edward III. Soon the critical, carping spirit hostile to all authority
which Wyclif had fostered led him to attack the authoritative
teaching of the Church on various points of doctrine. In regard
to the Blessed Sacrament, for instance, he adopted the old errors
70 A Short History of
of Berengar and rejected the doctrine of Transubstantiation. He
objected, too, to the invocation and veneration of the Saints ; he
rejected the sacraments of Orders, Matrimony, and Extreme Unction,
and even declared that Baptism was unnecessary in the case of
children born of Christian parents. The Pope he spoke of as
Antichrist ; and as he claimed that the Bible, interpreted as the
individual reader desired, was to be the sole authority in matters
of religion, he taught that to say that the Church of Borne was God's
appointed witness to the truth on earth was false and foolish. The
only head of the Church he would admit was the King, and his
authority was derived from the people.
For these and other such teachings Wyclif was summoned to
answer before Convocation on three different occasions ; but under
powerful secular influence he appears to have escaped formal con-
demnation until A.D. 1380. At the meeting of Convocation in that
year twenty-four propositions selected from his works were con-
demned, as heretical and dangerous, by the authority of the English
Church. Probably, however, on account of his failing health Wyclif
himself was left unmolested. He retired to his vicarage at Lutter-
worth, where he was attacked by paralysis whilst hearing Mass
in A.D. 1884 and shortly after died.
The poison of his erroneous teaching was not, however, destroyed
by Wyclif's death. For the next twenty years or so his followers,
who began to be known as Lollards, increased chiefly among the
lower classes. This was probably caused as much by the social
principles they adopted in accordance with their master's teaching as
by any real religious conviction or through hostility to the Church.
A series of risings, and many acts of violence, including the murder
of Archbishop Simon Sudbury, at last alarmed the secular authorities,
and the Lollards were repressed with a strong hand by Henry IV.
and Henry V. From about the end of the first quarter of the
fifteenth century the movement was practically stamped out, and
although the doctrines of Wyclif are much the same as those adopted
by the Reformers of the sixteenth century, there is in reality little or
no connection between them. An examination of the works of
the early English Protestant divines will show how very little
they based their teaching upon that of Wyclif, sheltered them-
selves under his authority, or even mentioned his name. As a
the Catholic Church in England 71
religious movement Lollardry had expired in England long before the
reign of Henry VIII.
It is perhaps necessary to refer briefly to Wyclif's supposed
connection with the vernacular Scriptures. He is usually credited,
it must be confessed on very slight evidence, with having been
the first to translate the Bible into English. Whether he had
anything to do with some translation of a part, or of the whole,
of the Bible is a matter of small importance; but the assertion
that usually accompanies the statement that the first English Bible
was his work, namely, that Catholics were altogether prohibited
by the English ecclesiastical authorities from reading the vernacular
Scriptures in pre-Beforination days, is now practically admitted
to have been made under a misconception. Further, as a mere
matter of fact, the vernacular version that is known now as the
Wycliffite Scriptures, has certainly come down to us from Catholic
sources, and can be shown to have been in the hands of men of
undoubted orthodoxy. No one who is really acquainted with the
facts can of course for a moment suppose that our Catholic ancestors
were not fully accustomed to the use of the Bible. The miracle plays
of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries brought the whole sequence
of Scripture History constantly before the popular mind, whilst
the stained-glass windows and painted walls of the churches were
truly " the books of the poor," ever impressing upon them the main
lessons of their religion and keeping before their eyes the chief scenes
from the Old and New Testaments.
The long civil wars of the fifteenth century must no doubt have
had their effect upon ecclesiastical discipline and life. It is, however,
at least remarkable that all during this period there was manifested
a real love of religion in the general desire of the people to rebuild, to
complete, and to beautify their parochial and other churches. The
proof of this can be sought in almost any part of the country,
and what is equally remarkable is that all this labour and money
spent upon God's house during the fifteenth and in the first quarter
of the sixteenth century was the labour and the money of the people
themselves. It is hardly possible to ask for a better proof that
the Church of their forefathers still claimed the allegiance and
engaged the affections of Englishmen generally.
A word must be said about the attitude of the Church in England
72 A Short History of
to learning in general and to the movement begun towards the
close of the fifteenth century, known as the Renaissance of Letters.
Contrary to what is somewhat generally believed, the Church has
ever shown herself the patron of sound learning, and in England
in particular, not only in early times, when the action of Churchmen
created our Universities, and monasteries furnished most of the
schools in the country, but in later times, when the lamp of learning
had been re-enkindled in Italy by the Greek exiles, ecclesiastics, and
monks from Christ Church, Canterbury, were actually the first to
journey over the seas and bring back the sacred flame to their
own country.
In regard to the beliefs of our Catholic forefathers during the
fifteenth century, there is abundant proof that in nothing had
they departed from the creed of their ancestors. In the Council
of Constance, A.D. 1417, at which more than a hundred English bishops,
abbots, and theologians, &c., were present, a strong protestation was
made on behalf of the nation against the proposal advanced by
France, that England should not be allowed an equal representation
with other countries in the Councils of the Church, but that it should
be considered as part of Germany. This protest, after stating the
reasons why England had as much right to a voice in the affairs
of the Universal Church as other Christian nations, says: " Moreover,
the kingdom of England, thanks be to God, has never swerved from
its obedience to the Roman Church; it has never tried to rend
the seamless coat of our Lord : it has never endeavoured to shake
off its loyalty to the Roman Pontiffs."
Ten years later again, in A.D. 1426, Pope Martin V., in a letter
to Archbishop Chicheley, states clearly not only that the Roman
Pontiffs had supreme authority as a fact, but that they derived
all their authority from the divine institution of Our Lord. He is
bound to protect, he says, " the rights and privileges of the Roman
Church and the Apostolic See, which Christ Himself gave by His
divine word, and not men." This contention is fully admitted by
the Archbishop in his reply on behalf of the English Church, for
the idea that the papacy was of ecclesiastical and not of divine
institution, which apparently in later times perplexed Sir Thomas
More, does not appear to have been the traditional view of the
English Church at this time, still less is there any suggestion that
the Catholic Church in England 73
England gave her obedience to the Pope on grounds of national
policy or expediency, and not on a dogmatic basis. The principle
is put clearly by the University of Oxford in their letter, written
at the same time as that of Archbishop Chicheley. "We recognise
in your beloved person the true Head," the writers say. "We
profess without doubt and from our hearts (that you are) the one
supreme Pontiff, the Vicar of Christ on earth and the true successor
of St. Peter."
74 A Short History of
VIII
BREAKING AWAY FROM ROME
WHEN Henry VIII. carne to the throne in A.D. 1509 the English
Church founded by St. Augustine had already existed more than nine
hundred years. It had grown with the nation, or more truly, the
nation had grown with it. The unity of the Church, under one
head, the Pope, the same in Faith and government existing in the
various kingdoms of Saxon England, had undoubtedly contributed the
object-lesson which finally brought about the welding of the various
tribes into the one great kingdom of England. In doctrine, discipline,
and government the Church at the beginning of the sixteenth century
was the same as that established in A.D. 597 by Pope St. Gregory
the Great in the kingdom of Kent. During all those centuries the
great cathedrals, monasteries, colleges and other ecclesiastical buildings
which covered the land had been raised to the honour of God by the
unswerving faith of the members of the one Church founded on Peter's
Bock. The boast made, as we have seen, a century before at the
Council of Constance, that there was no Church more loyal to Home
and the Pope, and no Church which had kept the purity of the Faith
more zealously, or been less tainted with heresy than the English
Church, was equally true when Henry VII. died and for many years
after. That this was the case almost to the very hour of the final
breaking away from Rome we have clear and distinct testimony. In
1521 Henry VIII. sent John Clerk, Bishop of Bath and Wells, to
Borne to present his work on the Seven Sacraments against Luther.
Clerk was received in full Consistory on Wednesday, October 2nd, and
made his oration before the Pope, the Cardinals, and all the Ambassadors
the Catholic Church in England 75
of Europe. The theme of his speech was the loyalty of the English
Church. " Of other nationalities," he says, " let others speak. But
assuredly rny Britain my England, as in later times she has been
called has never yielded to Spain, never to France, never to Germany,
never to Italy, never to any nearer nation, no, not even to Rome
itself, in the service of God and in the Christian faith, and in the
obedience due to the most Holy Roman Church ; even as there is no
nation which more opposes, more condemns, more loathes this monster
(i.e., Protestantism) and the heresies which spring from it." As Clerk
was the King's Ambassador, this was not only a public but an official
declaration.
That the nation was thoroughly Catholic at heart cannot be
questioned ; still it may be admitted also that the Church in life and
discipline was not all that could be desired. The circumstances
which had contributed to this, need not here be discussed ; it is
sufficient to know that many of the most learned and the best English
churchmen had recognised the need in this country as elsewhere at
the time of greater discipline and greater earnestness in God's work.
There were, however, it would seem, no very great abuses which called
aloud for redress; although here and there it appeared as if "the
salt " was beginning " to lose its savour." Still it may be safely said
that the idea of any change of religion never even entered into the
wildest calculations, even of those who seem to have been most
dissatisfied with the actual condition of things on the eve of the
Reformation. They never could have imagined that the best way
to beautify the house of God would be to dig up the foundations,
or the proper way to begin to purify the Church would be to destroy its
unity and abolish the visible Headship by the creation of a national
Church.
Momentous issues often spring from small causes ; and it was, in the
beginning at least, a mere love affair of Henry VIII. which initiated the
policy that finally dragged England into schism and heresy. In A.D.
1529 Cardinal Wolsey was disgraced and stripped of all his offices for
having failed in his efforts to please the King and procure his divorce
from Queen Catherine. The Pope, there can be little doubt, would
have done what Henry desired had it been possible for him to do so
according to his conscience and the law of God. The matter rested
here for a while, and it almost seemed as if Henry would in the end
7 6 A Short History of
accept the inevitable, when it was suggested to him that by imitating
the example of the German princes he might make himself Head
of the English Church, and that then he would be in a position to
settle his own matter in his own way.
To obtain the support of Parliament, Henry ingeniously contrived
to suggest that the nation had incurred the penalties of prcemunirc
by admitting the legatine powers of Cardinal Wolsey, although, of
course, they had been exercised with the royal knowledge and by the
royal authority. The laity were pardoned for this technical offence ;
but the clergy were excluded, with the intention of using the situation
in which they were placed to secure their recognition of the King as
" Supreme Head of the Church of England." The bishops thought
that they knew Henry, and offered to purchase their pardon by a
large sum of money. The King, however, knew his own object, and
refused, unless they inserted into their submission certain clauses,
amongst others one acknowledging his Headship of the Church, and
another declaring that the King's protection had enabled English
Churchmen to minister in peace " ( in the cure of souls committed to
His Majesty." Convocation debated these demands during two-and-
thirty sessions, and there is sufficient evidence of consideration in
the changes introduced into the proposed clauses. The second of the
above demands was changed by the clergy from " the cure of souls
committed to His Majesty" to "the cure of souls in the nation
committed to His Majesty." This alteration throws considerable
light upon the sense in which they ultimately agreed to the first-
named clause, which, as they passed it, ran, "of the English Church
and clergy whose Protector and Supreme Head he alone is."
King Henry was evidently not best pleased, but for the time at
least he had to be content with a statement which he must have
known, as Dean Hook says, " was not at the time of the Convocation
regarded as inconsistent with the legitimate claims of the papacy."
In fact, when Bishop Tunstall, on behalf of the Convocation of the
Northern Province, asked for information as to the exact meaning of
the phrase " Supreme Head," the King replied, calling the Pope the
"Head of the Church" and the "Prince of Bishops." He argued
that as to call the Pope " most holy " implied no disrespect to
St. Peter ; and as to call a person Archbishop implied no derogation
to the authority of the Pope, who was par excellence " the Arch-
the Catholic Church in England 77
bishop," because the addition of the name of the place safeguarded
the meaning, so the proposed title of " Supreme Headship, 1 ' if given
to the King, would not interfere with any spiritual authority, because
it only referred to the King in his position as feudal lord over the
clergy in things temporal. It can hardly be made more certain that,
as Froude says, " the title was not intended to imply what it implied,
when, four years later, it was conferred by Act of Parliament,
and when England virtually was severed by it from the Roman
communion." Moreover, after this declaration bishops continued to
receive their Bulls from Rome, and the King still continued to plead
the cause of his divorce before the Roman Courts. He "had not
formally broken off his relations with the Pope ; and it is quite
certain that neither Warham, Fisher, nor More would have accepted
the words if they had necessarily implied a renunciation of papal
authority."
In the year A.D. 1532 another step on the road from Rome was
taken. An Act was passed called the " Submission of the Clergy,"
by which they promised for the future not to legislate in Convocation
without the royal assent. In the same year Henry devised a means
to coerce the Pope through Parliament. Hitherto the "Firstfruits "
of bishoprics, &c., known as Annates, and consisting of the amount
of the first year's revenue, had been made payable to the Pope for
the support of the Curia. The King now induced the Parliament to
declare that these payments should be made to the King, whenever
he might elect to give his assent to the Act. This was purely a
parliamentary measure, and the Church had no part in it. As the
sum received by the Pope from this source was very considerable
the Act indeed stated that during the past forty-five years the
average payment under this head had been ^3,500 a year Henry
hoped to have in his hands a means whereby he could bring the
Pope to his terms by threatening to stop supplies. It was in this
same year, A.D. 1532, that Sir Thomas More resigned the ofiice of
Chancellor into the King's hands.
On August 22, A.D. 1532, the aged Archbishop of Canterbury,
Warham, breathed his last. "We cannot doubt," writes Mr. Gairdner,
"that the event at once suggested to the King a new method of
achieving his end." This was by securing the appointment of a
successor who would help him ; and Thomas Cranmer was in every
7 8 A Short History of
way likely to prove himself a useful tool in the royal hands if he
were promoted to the See of Canterbury. He had been a tutor in
the Boleyn family, and in defiance of the then ecclesiastical laws
had secretly married though a priest. Further, his first wife having
died, he had recently in Germany taken to himself a second lady in the
person of the niece of Osiander, the German reformer. Cranrner, who
was abroad at the time of Warhatn's death, was sent for to England, and
the Bulls of Consecration were applied for in the ordinary way from
the Pope. These were obtained with all the haste possible, and
Cranmer was consecrated on March 80, 1533, receiving his pallium at
the same time. By a solemn act of perjury he took the usual oaths of
obedience and loyalty to the Pope, although he had privately declared
beforehand that he would hold these vows as null and void, and
that he intended to take and hold his See from the King only.
Another step in the work of separating England from the jurisdiction
of the Holy See was now taken by the King. Cranmer gave judgment
on the great divorce question in favour of Henry. Forthwith the
King made Ann Boleyn his Queen on June 1, A.D. 1533, having been
already privately married to her five months before ; the Princess
Elizabeth was born on September 7th following, only four months
after Cranmer had declared Henry free to marry. To prevent any
interference with this so-called definitive sentence, Parliament at this
same time was induced to pass an Act which prohibited appeals to
the Pope from any sentence of an English court.
In the session of Parliament held in 1534 the Act for the future
payments of Annates to the King in the place of the Pope received
the royal sanction ; in the same session, an Act of Succession making
Elizabeth heir to the throne, was passed. This last was of greater
importance than its name would imply, for in the preamble was
embodied the statement of the Royal Supremacy, which had been
extorted from the clergy in A.D. 1531, and which, as we have seen,
was regarded by them at the time as not inconsistent with papal
jurisdiction. This formula, however, could no longer be regarded as
susceptible of a Catholic interpretation, since, in the spring of A.D. 1534
the Convocations of Canterbury and York under royal pressure had
formally declared that " the Bishop of Rome has not in Scripture
any greater jurisdiction in the kingdom of England than any foreign
bishop." In March, A.D. 1534, " the submission of the clergy " was
the Catholic Church in England 79
formally embodied in an Act of Parliament, and in November the
work of schism was completed by the Supreme Head Act, styling
Henry without any reservation the only " Supreme Head in earth of
the Church of England," and adding to his ecclesiastical headship
the amplest powers of ecclesiastical visitation. Finally, so far as
Parliament was concerned, it set the finishing touch to its work of
putting all power into the King's hands by the Verbal Treasons Act,
which passed in December, 1534 ; by this statute it was declared high
treason even to "imagine " any bodily harm to either King or Queen,
or " to deprive them of their dignity, title, style," &c.
The oath, as framed, was taken by the Universities and by many,
if not most, of the monastic and capitular bodies. The bishops with
one exception also gave way ; the exception, of course, being Blessed
John Fisher of Kochester, who, with the illustrious Sir Thomas More,
refused to burden their consciences by agreeing to the demands of the
King. They preferred imprisonment and death. The former received
his martyr's crown on June 22, 1535, the latter on July 6th. They
were joined in their valiant confession for conscience and religion by
some Carthusians, Brigittines, and Franciscan Observants.
The change had been now made. That the nation disliked what
had been done cannot be doubted. In spite of the Act for Verbal
Treasons "on no other subject during the entire reign have we such
overt and repeated expressions of dissatisfaction unto the King and
his proceedings," writes Mr. Gairdner. The " ecclesiastical headship "
was " without precedent, and at variance with all tradition," or, as
the same authority says, "it was a totally new order in the Church."
There can be little doubt that Henry had been pushed along faster
and further than he had any notion of going when he embarked upon
his ecclesiastical policy. Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Crumwell
had secured a success for him beyond his dreams, and they were at
hand to see that there was no turning back. It was no emancipation
of the English Church that was intended or indeed carried into effect
by Henry's legislation. The famous Statute 25 Henry VIII. cap 20,
which requires Chapters to elect, and the Archbishop to confirm, the
royal nominees to bishoprics, under penalties of imprisonment and
pramunire, is proof that it was no measure of liberty that was
intended by Henry or his advisers.
The year A.D. 1536 saw the King legislating for his spiritual flock in
8o A Short History of
his new capacity as head of the Church. He first appointed Thomas
Cmmwell his Vicar- General in Spirituals, and in this capacity
Crumwell took the first place at all meetings of the bishops and
presided at Convocation. It was then determined to have a general
visitation of the religious houses, as a means for preparing the public
mind for their subsequent destruction. The visitors found out in
their inspections what they we're expected to find, and their reports
at least so the King assured the Commons proved that whilst the
greater religious houses were well conducted, those with an income of
less than ^200 a year were dens of infamy. Parliament with a little
careful management agreed to suppress these, and allowed the King
to take possession of then* property. For the next three years the
destruction of monasteries, convents and friaries went on rapidly all
over the country; for Henry, not content with the spoils he had
obtained from the suppression of the lesser houses, cast envious eyes
upon the richer prey and quickly set his agents to devise means to
secure the greater houses also.
Meanwhile, in A.D. 1536, Henry through Cramner had divorced his
second wife. The Archbishop curiously enough pronounced exactly
the same sentence against Anne and her child Elizabeth as he had
passed three years previously on poor Catherine and the Princess
Mary. This done, Queen Anne was executed, and Henry forthwith
married Jane Seymour.
At length the nation rose against the religious changes in what is
known as the " Pilgrimage of Grace." The insurgents demanded the
abolition of the statutes against papal supremacy, the restoration of
the monasteries, the punishment of Crumwell, the extirpation of
heresy, and the dismissal of Cranmer, Latimer, and Holgate, the new
bishops, who were known to have leanings towards Lutheranism and
who had been most active against the Pope's supremacy. It is un-
necessary to enter into the details of the rising. It failed ; and terrible
was the punishment meted out by the King on all who had taken part
in it, or manifested any sympathy in its objects. Henceforth the
nation appears to have acquiesced in all Henry's tyrannies and
religious vagaries with silent submission. The final suppression of
the religious houses flooded England, of course, with vast numbers of
poor, who had hitherto found work and assistance at the monasteries.
The country became a land of rums, since the monastic buildings, which
the Catholic Church in England 81
included some of the finest churches in the country from an architectural
point of view, became the common quarries from which the neighbour-
ing people obtained stones for road-making, for building their pig- styes
or their farm out-houses. Consecrated plate of all kinds and precious
vestments of any value, with mitres and such like, found their way into
the royal treasury as so much plunder, but blessed bells were only
considered fit to break into fragments to be sold by the pound weight.
For ten years there was a veritable reign of terror in England. No
one was secure. Spies scattered throughout the land reported every-
thing to their master and numerous executions constantly emphasised
the fact that the King had all power in his hands, and struck terror
into the minds of the people generally. The prime mover in all this
was Thomas Crumwell, the Vicar-General, until he too fell a victim
to his own laws and was executed in 1540.
With the separation of England from Rome, and the legal appoint-
ment of Henry as Head of the Church in place of the Pope, some
further religious changes were in the nature of things inevitable.
What these were seem really to have sprung from certain qualities
in the King's disposition. In the first place came his avarice, which
had been fed upon the spoils of the Church until it had become a
ruling passion. This vice may be said with safety to explain his
cutting down the honours paid to the Saints and their images and the
destruction of their shrines, the prohibition of Masses for the souls in
Purgatory, and his projected abolition of chantries and guilds. The
second quality in Henry's character may be described as his Catholic
instinct, which he never wholly lost. This forced him to oppose
Crumwell, Cranmer, and others in their attempts to commit England
to the full Reformation principles of Germany. In his notes upon
the Institution of a Christian Man, a book made by the bishops in
explanation of what people were to believe, the King shows his keen
theological instinct. Upon the dispensation to work on holy days in
case of need being mentioned, he notes, for example, " so that we neglect
not Mass and Evensong." In the same spirit he condemned Lambert
the heretic for his denial of the corporal Presence of Our Lord in the
Blessed Eucharist ; he communicated always in one kind, and shortly
before his death, though ill and suffering, he rose from his seat at Mass
to kneel, and in answer to the remonstrances of his courtiers for thus
casting himself on his knees, he said: " If I could throw myself down
LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE
82 A Short History of
not only on the ground but under the ground, I should not then think
that I gave honour enough to the most holy Sacrament."
Henry's Reformation changes had regard chiefly to certain slight
modifications in the Divine Service, to various Confessions of Faith
and Manuals of Devotion, and to the Bible in English. The year 1538
was the high-water mark of the power of the Reforming party in his
reign, and in the "Injunctions" issued in September by Crumwell,
with the King's approval, all were ordered to see " to the removal of
all images, which had been abused by pilgrimages, offerings, or
candles set up to them," and to " the discontinuance of all perma-
nent lights in Churches, except one in the rood-loft, another before the
Sacrament, and a third over against the Sepulchre." Apart from this
attack on images nothing was done against the old order except the
abolition of certain holy days, at the request of the London merchants,
who represented that the great number of feasts was interfering with
trade. The King, however, in his private chapel continued to keep them
all. On the other hand, in A.D. 1539, the continuance of the ancient
ceremonies of the Church, including holy bread and holy water, ashes
on Ash Wednesday, candles on the Purification, and the Creeping to
the Cross on Good Friday, was ordered by royal proclamation to be
observed as heretofore. Further, beyond a general erasure of the
Pope's name from the missal and breviary in A.D. 1535 ; and later, the
cutting out of the office for St. Thomas Becket, nothing was done to
the official liturgical service-books. Certain manuals of private
devotion were, however, printed to supersede those which had been
in use in mediaeval times, and in these various changes, especially in
regard to the old devotions to the Saints, can be detected which point
to the working of Protestant influences. This is very noticeable in the
Primers, especially in the Prefaces ; and the edition issued by Bishop
Hilsey, with its shortened invocations, had a sort of official sanction.
Hitherto, formularies of faith other than the time-honoured creeds
of Christendom, had been unknown in England. From the date of the
breach with Rome in A.D. 1536, however, until the production of the
Articles in A.D. 1571, Englishmen were to know a great variety of
"Confessions" of their belief. At the beginning of this period of
thirty-five years it was perhaps to be expected that the new Head of
the Church would think well to state exactly his theological position.
This he did in no less than four official declarations: "The Ten
the Catholic Church in England 83
Articles," (A.D. 1536), the " Institution of a Christian Man " (A.D, 1537),
the " Six Articles " (A.D. 1537), and the " Necessary Doctrine and Erudi-
tion for any Christian Man " (A.D. 1539). The first of these, the Ten
Articles, was chiefly the King's own work, in which he was assisted by
Bishop Fox of Hereford. The formulary was discussed, approved by
Convocation, and issued by Henry to his subjects as an authoritative
declaration of what they were to believe. Cranmer made a speech at
the assembly, and deliberately questioned the reality of the Sacraments,
save the Lord's Supper and Baptism. The whole speech is Protestant
in tone, and Crumwell, who presided, Fox and Alexander Ales
(Cranmer's guest) , who were present, were strong Reformers. It is con-
sequently not surprising to find in the Ten Articles that only three of
the Sacraments namely the Eucharist, Baptism and Penance are
treated ; and in view of Cranmer's speech, in which he declared that
their business was to see whether " Orders, Anealing, Confirmation, and
other Sacraments, which were not institute of Christ, were real
Sacraments," the omission of these seems deliberate and advised as
the result of their deliberations. The Institution usually known as
the " Bishops' Book," as it was not formally approved by Convocation
or issued by the King was meant to supply the deficiencies of the
Ten Articles, as it dealt with the other four Sacraments. Both books,
however, from a theological standpoint were no doubt intended to be
a compromise between the Old and the New Learning and represented
only a passing phase of Henry's theological teaching. The third
book, the Necessary Doctrine, was a revision of the Institution ; but
its tone was certainly more conservative on all questions, except as
regards the position and authority of the King in matters ecclesiastical.
Greater prominence is given in this book to the Sacrament of the
Eucharist, and the practice of Communion under one kind is specially
defended and insisted upon. Finally the Six Articles asserted (1)
the natural Presence of our Lord in the Eucharist, and a doctrine
identical with Transubstantiation ; (2) that Communion under both
kinds was not necessary for salvation ; (3) that the marriage of priests
was unlawful ; (4) that vows of chastity were binding ; (5) that private
Masses should be continued, and (6) that auricular Confession was
" expedient and necessary." For holding or maintaining any belief
contrary to the first the penalty was to be the "pains of death by
way of burning" ; for any opinion contrary to the other articles the
84 A Short History of
first offence entailed forfeiture and imprisonment, the second involved
the death of a felon.
It remains to say a word about the English Bible. As early as
A.D. 1526 Tyndale, with the avowed object of spreading the Lutheran
principles and tenets in England, had printed a New Testament
abroad and procured its circulation in England. It was full of
obvious and not unintentional mistranslations and glosses, and at the
instance of the bishops it was prohibited by the King. This was
followed by the translation of the whole Bible made by Miles Coverdale
in Zurich, and at Crumwell's instigation it was allowed to be circulated
in England. Then came in A.D. 1537 Matthew's Bible, and in
A.D. 1539 " The Great Bible," attributed to the bishops and published
with the King's approbation. Henry, however, apparently always
viewed the dissemination of the vernacular Scriptures with suspicion,
and at last he came to see that his fears were well founded, and that
it was absolutely necessary to restrict the Bible reading to the
learned. Bishop Bonner, owing to the noise and irreverence caused
in churches by frequent discussions, was obliged in A.D. 1540 to
remove the six chained Bibles from St. Paul's. In A.D. 1543 the King
passed an Act forbidding any part of the Scriptures to be read by the
lower orders, ordering all Bibles with Tyndale's name to be destroyed
and all notes in other Bibles to be obliterated. In A.D. 1546 Cover-
dale's Bible was also prohibited, and Henry, in what was practically
his last speech in Parliament, fully acknowledged the failure of his
experiment in allowing promiscuous Bible reading : "I am very
sorry to know how that most precious jewel the Word of God is
disputed, rhymed, sung, and jangled in every alehouse. I am equally
sorry that the readers of the same follow it so faintly and coldly in
living ; for this I am sure that charity was never so faint among
you and virtuous and godly living was never less used and God Him-
self among Christians was never less reverenced, honoured and served."
Truly a melancholy confession by the King of the evil results flowing
from his religious revolution and his attempt at Church government,
made just before his death, which took place on January 28, 1547.
It may be useful at this point to pause in our survey of events and
try to gain a clear idea of the actual religious situation in England at
the death of Henry VIII. The English king was now practically an
the Catholic Church in England 85
absolute monarch, and the people had been taught by many hard
lessons that his will was to be regarded as law, In religious matters
no less than in affairs of State, for the first time in the history of the
country, the monarch was supreme. This position had been secured
to him by the untiring efforts and consummate diplomacy of Thomas
Crumwell, the King's Vicar-General in Spirituals, perhaps the most
sagacious and capable of any minister who has ever served an English
sovereign and certainly one of the most unscrupulous. Under his
management, and, in the main at least, as the outcome of his fertile
brain, changes great and important had undoubtedly marked and
followed upon the rejection of the Catholic principle of papal authority
and the assumption by the late sovereign of the Supreme Headship
of the Church in England. Such changes were, however, in a
measure, external to the practical religious life of the nation generally.
The hopes entertained by the German Eeformers of winning England
to the principles of the Lutheran revolt from Rome, encouraged as
they had been by a temporary vacillation on the part of Henry and
by their knowledge of the active support given to those principles by
a band of sympathisers headed by Archbishop Cranmer himself, were
doomed to be disappointed. In the end, by his royal Supremacj',
Henry repressed, with a strong hand, all dangerous foreign innova-
tions in the religious teaching and practices of the English Church,
and the royal power was exerted as much against the upholders of
the Reformed doctrines as against those of the " old Faith " who
clung to the Pope as the main safeguard of Christian unity and the
divinely appointed head of the Universal Church.
There were strange contradictions visible to all who might look.
The country itself from one point of view was indeed a veritable land
of ruins. Everywhere, in cities and towns, on the great high-roads
and in secluded, out-of-the-way places, from one end of England
to the other and across its breadth, the gaunt and blackened walls of
the destroyed abbeys and other religious houses bore their plain,
though silent, testimony to some great national upheaval. At the
same time in the cathedrals and parish churches all over the land
religious services went on very much as generations of Catholic
worshippers had remembered them. Here and there, it is true, as
at Canterbury, or Winchester, or Durham or elsewhere, a dismantled
shrine, or altar robbed of its rich ornaments, or smashed painted
86 A Short History of
window, gave some indication of the insatiable greed of Henry, or of
his strange fanatical hostility to the Saints of God in general and to
St. Thomas Becket in particular. But all through the reign right
to the end, in spite of all the religious upheaval, in the parochial
churches, Matins, Mass, and Evensong went on as before ; in the
pulpits the Catholic sacramental system was taught, and the seven
sacraments were administered by the clergy to the people as they
had been from the days of St. Augustine then nearly a thousand years
before.
It is hard to realise this strange state of affairs. The religious con-
dition of England was a perplexity to intelligent foreigners who re-
garded it from a distance, no less than to the people of the country
itself. To these, unquestionably, taken as a body, the King's pro-
ceedings in his ecclesiastical capacity as the head of the Church of
England were unpopular and distasteful. There were of course some,
perhaps many, restless spirits to whom the King's opposition to the
introduction of the foreign Reformation principles into England, was
as galling as it was inexplicable. But these were only the few, and
as a nation, at the death of Henry, Englishmen were content to
believe as their forefathers had, just as they still worshipped God in
the great Sacrifice of the Mass as generations had done before them.
the Catholic Church in England 87
PART III
THE RELIGIOUS CHANGES AND THE CENTURIES
OF PERSECUTION
IX
FURTHER FROM ROME INTO HERESY
EDWARD VI., the son of Jane Seymour, was only nine years of age
when his father, Henry VIII., died. By careful management the
Reforming party under the Earl of Hertford captured the authority.
It was significant of the coming policy that Wriothesley, the
Chancellor, and Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, both hitherto known
as opposing innovations in religion, were left out of the Council.
Hertford was made Duke of Somerset, and his brother, Sir Thomas
Seymour, became Lord Seymour of Sudeley, and from the first, reli-
gious enactments occupied a good deal of the attention of Somerset,
now the Lord Protector, and his counsellors.
At the outset the bishops were required to take out fresh commis-
sions to exercise their spiritual functions just as other officials of
the State, the royal power being declared in the preamble of the
letters to be the source of all jurisdiction whether civil or ecclesiasti-
cal. Cranmer set a willing example of prompt obedience in this ; but
to the others the requirement was eminently distasteful, and Bishop
Gardiner even protested at this novel and derogatory demand.
Cranmer and the Council were at this time educating themselves
rapidly in the principles of Lutheranism, and the Archbishop was in
88 A Short History of
constant communication with the advanced Reformers in Germany.
Within a month of the King's accession there were images mutilated
and destroyed in some London churches, and sermons were preached
against the observance of Lent, which acts, in spite of Bishop
Gardiner's protest, remained unpunished. In May the bishops were
forbidden to make visitations in their various dioceses, in view of a
royal visitation that was in contemplation. This order was, however,
relaxed, and on the last day of June the King's printer issued two
publications under the authority of the Council. These were the
well-known " Injunctions" of Edward VI. and the equally well-known
" Homilies." The first were addressed to all, lay as well as clerical,
and their object was, amongst other things, to maintain periodical
preaching against " the Bishop of Rome's usurped power and
jurisdiction," and to order the destruction of images, shrines, and
pictures. The Litany was no longer to be said in procession, but
kneeling; and the Epistle and Gospel were to be read in English.
The " Book of Homilies" consisted of twelve discourses, which had
been drawn up some years before and proposed to Convocation, but
had not then been approved. They were now issued by the authority
of the Council.
In September, Bishops Bonner and Gardiner were sent to prison
for resistance to the changes generally, and in particular for their
objection to the above-named "Injunctions and Homilies," which
they considered could not be properly issued with authority whilst
the King was under age. Gardiner especially strongly criticised the
Homily on Salvation, which was Cranmer's own composition, and he
was fetched from prison for a day on purpose to argue the matter
with the Archbishop. Meanwhile during this same month of
September a general visitation was in progress, when by order of
the Visitors the images at St. Paul's and in the London churches
generally were pulled down and broken. The churches were at the
same time whitewashed to destroy the painted pictures and frescoes,
in place of which the Ten Commandments were written upon the
walls.
Parliament met in November, A.D. 1547, whilst Bishop Gardiner
was still a prisoner in the Fleet. Of the business done at this time
the most important, from our point of view, was an Act about the
Sacrament. It first contained a provision for the punishment of
the Catholic Church in England 89
irreverent speaking about it, which was becoming very common, and
then it ordered that the Communion should henceforth be adminis-
tered to the laity under both kinds, which it is right to say had
previously been suggested by Convocation.
In the same Parliament the process of spoliation of the Church
initiated in the late reign was continued. A Bill was passed, in spite
of considerable opposition in the House of Lords most of the
bishops, including Cranmer, speaking against it giving to the Crown
all colleges, free chapels, and chantries, with all endowments for
obits or anniversaries, as well as the property of all guilds and
brotherhoods. By this measure not only was the gravest injustice
done to the members of the various guilds, which formed the
charitable associations, insurance societies, burial and sick clubs of
Catholic England the funds thus taken representing for the most
part the savings of the poor but religion suffered the gravest injury
by the confiscation of chantry funds and obit revenues, which were
in many, if not most, cases intended to supply stipends for additional
curates in populous parishes.
Early in A.D. 1548 Cranmer intimated that the Council had
abrogated the Catholic practices of blessed candles, ashes, and palms,
but that no other innovations were to be made except the above, and
the omission of the old ceremonies of Creeping to the Cross, the
taking of holy water and holy bread, which apparently on his own
authority Cranmer had already forbidden in his diocese. On March 8th
was published a little book giving the "Order of the Communion,"
as it was henceforth to be administered under the Act of Parliament.
The Latin Mass was, however, neither abrogated nor superseded, the
new ritual being intended only for the communion of the laity. The
most important feature in this new "Order" was the General
Confession, which, as it expressly declared, was to do away with the
necessity for the private confession of the individual if he had no
wish to be shriven. The form was essentially that of the celebrated
Consultatio of Hermann von Wied, the Archbishop of Cologne,
which had just appeared in an English translation.
Cranmer, however, was already preparing for further liturgical
changes. About this time he proposed a series of questions on the
Sacrament to the bishops. One of these queries had reference to
the nature of the Oblation of Christ in the Mass, and was an
90 A Short History of
indication of some serious attack about to be made upon the great
Christian Sacrifice. Meanwhile Bishop Gardiner had been giving
the Council no peace. He had been set free under promise to preach
to their satisfaction, and he had chosen St. Peter's day, June 29,
1548, to proclaim his belief in " the very presence " of Christ's body
and blood in the Blessed Sacrament. In the afternoon of the follow-
ing day he found himself a prisoner in the Tower.
All was prepared for abrogating the old service books by the
autumn of the year 1548. In September there was evidently some
peculiar service actually being used in the royal chapel and about
the same time a committee of the bishops, probably at Windsor and
Chertsey, had composed the Uniform Order of praj'er, which was soon
afterwards laid before Parliament and received the sanction of law.
On November 24, 1548, the Houses met after the prorogation, and at
once proceeded to debate the question of the marriage of priests, and
though the measure sanctioning it quickly passed the Commons, it
was dela3 r ed till February in the Lords.
On December 14, A.D. 1548, the draft of the new Prayer Book was
introduced into the Lords and a long and earnest debate followed, to
hear which, it is said, the Commons flocked to the galleries. In this
debate it appeared clearly that Cranmer had given up all belief in
Transubstantiation and in the Sacrificial character of the Eucharist.
During the course of the discussion also it was shown that the draft
of the service book had been already submitted to the bishops who
were then not in prison, except Day of Chichester, and that they had
signed the proposed draft, but with the idea that this was not
necessarily approving it. Moreover, Bishop Thirlby, in the course of
the discussion, pointed out that a trick had been played upon them ;
in the copy which had been shown them the word " Oblation " was
still to be seen in the Canon, and it had been afterwards erased with-
out their knowledge. Parliament finally authorised the Book by a
statute the first Act of Uniformity on January 15, 1549, ordering
all to make use of it under severe pains and penalties after the
determined date.
The Communion Service in the first Book of Common Prayer
whatever else it is, is certainly not the Mass in English. It was so
different, indeed, even to the eyes of the common people, that they
christened it "a Christmas game," and this although obvious care
the Catholic Church in England 91
was taken by its compilers to preserve some outward resemblance
to the ancient liturgy in the disposition of its parts. All idea of
" Oblation " and " Sacrifice " had been carefully cut out of the new
service ; and the very centre of the ancient Mass, the Canon, every
word and syllable of which was held sacred by the Church, which was
substantially the same in every Western liturgy, was mutilated beyond
recognition. The very words of " Institution " or " Consecration,"
also, which it might have been thought even Cranmer would have
regarded as too sacred to touch, were rejected in favour of a new
form taken from the Lutheran use of Nuremberg, which had been
drawn up by Osiander, Cranmer's relative by marriage. In a word,
both in substance and spirit the first Prayer Book of Edward VI.
was conceived in a Lutheran sense. It was as little a translation
of the old Catholic liturgy of the Mass as the Lutheran productions
of the sixteenth century, which were ostensibly based upon an entire
rejection of the Sacrificial character of the Mass.
At this period, and, indeed, from the early days of Edward's reign,
Cranmer was constantly inviting foreign divines over to England to
assist in the change of religion. Fagius, Alasco, Bucer, Peter Martyr
and others had already found places at our Universities ; for these
indeed required all Cranmer's authority to turn them from the old
theology to the New learning. These foreigners, however, did not,
unfortunately for their peace, agree with one another as to their
doctrine ; for Bucer held what was considered higher views about
the Sacrament than Martyr did, although they both were at one in
rejecting the Catholic doctrine. Even Martyr, however, wished much
for Bucer's presence in the country before he came, since in his
private letters he confessed that the position in England was a
difficult one for a Eeformer, seeing that all who possessed any learning
in the country were opposed to the new ideas.
If the changes in religion were disliked by the learned, they
were equally disapproved of by the people of England generally.
The new Prayer Book came into use on Whit Sunday, June 9, 1549
and the very next day the people of Sampford Courtenay, in Devon,
compelled their parish priest to return to the old Missal. This
was the beginning of a rising in Devon, Cornwall and elsewhere,
which at one time seemed likely to be serious, as Exeter was
besieged for six weeks, The insurgents sent up their "Articles" to
92 A Short History of
the Council, and they were plain demands for the restoration of
religion as it was before all the late changes, and their words leave no
doubt that the alterations were universally disliked. The movement
was put down by Warwick with a large force, and the usual executions
struck terror into the hearts of those who objected so strongly to the
introduction of Cramner's Lutheranism. In connection with this
rising in the West, Bishop Bonner found himself in trouble. He was
ordered to preach on the unlawfulness of rebellion, and, like Gardiner,
he took advantage of a large audience assembled to hear him to
speak much on the doctrine of the Keal Presence of Christ in the
Eucharist. He was at once summoned to answer for his boldness,
and took exception to Latimer and Hooper sitting as his judges, since
they were, he said, notorious heretics on the matter of the Sacrament.
Of course his case was prejudged. He was at once declared to be
deprived of his bishopric, and on October 1, 1549, was committed
a prisoner to the Marshalsea.
Just a week after this the Protector, Somerset, was himself adjudged
to be a traitor, through the influence of his rival Warwick, who
subsequently became the Duke of Northumberland. In another week,
October 14th, the late Protector found himself lodged in the Tower.
At first it was believed by the nation that his fall portended a
religious reaction. Mass was again forthwith celebrated at Oxford
in the college chapels and elsewhere, and even Hooper thought
there were such good grounds for this idea of a return to the old
religion, that he wrote his fears to his friends abroad. I expect,
he said, soon to "be restored to my country and my Father
which is in Heaven." Meanwhile, however, the flood of contro-
versial and pernicious literature of the most scurrilous kind against
the old religion, and in particular against the Mass, continued un-
checked. " The Government really wanted argument on one side
only; and it is past a doubt," says Mr. Gairdner, "that they
favoured indirectly the spread of a kind of literature which they
professed openly to condemn."
Parliament met again on November 4, 1549. Among other
ecclesiastical business it was asked to transact early in the following
year was a measure intended to further purify the churches even
from external evidences of the old Faith. All images were ordered
to be removed and destroyed at once, except, as the Act says some-
the Catholic Church in England 93
what comically, monumental images " of any king, prince, noble-
man or other dead person which hath not been commonly reputed
or taken for a saint ! " In this same Parliament, on January 8,
A.D. 1550, a Bill for a new Ordinal was introduced into the House of
Peers. It gave rise to considerable discussion, and out of fourteen
bishops present, five voted against it, many of the Catholic prelates
being of course in prison. It is called " A New form and manner
of making and consecrating archbishops, bishops, priests and
deacons," and it was approved of by Parliament in anticipation and
ordered to be ready for April 1. Bishop Heath, " for that he did
obstinately refuse to subscribe" to the proposed substitution for
the old Pontifical, was lodged in the Fleet prison on March 4. The
new Ordinal did for the Catholic Pontifical what the Prayer Book had
done for the Missal. Having first swept away all the Minor Orders
with the Subdiaconate, the compilers carefully and systematically
changed the old traditional forms of Orders in the advanced Lutheran
sense. Having in the Prayer Book got rid of the Sacrifice, the
Ordinal logically expunged every suggestion of the sacrificial cha-
racter of the priesthood.
Eidley, one of the advanced reformers, was now established in
the See of the deprived and imprisoned Bishop Bonner. He thought
that, in the Visitation he made in London in the spring of A.D. 1550,
he might safely take another step forward and get rid of the altars
from the churches, their demolition having already been decreed by
an Order of Council signed by Cranmer, Goodrich, and others, which
set forth the reasons for their destruction, drawn up by Eidley
himself. The abolition of the Sacrifice and the sacrificing priest
had obviously made them obsolete and unnecessary. Eidley con-
sequently directed the churchwardens to procure in their place
"the form of a table," in order " more and more to turn the simple
from the old superstitious opinions of the popish Mass." The sub-
stitute for the altar was to be " after the form of an honest table
decently covered," and was to be placed anywhere in the chancel or
choir, as most convenient. At St. Paul's various experiments were
made, both as to the best position for the " Lord's board," and as to
the place where the minister could most conveniently stand at it.
" When your table was constituted," said Bishop White of Winchester
four years later to Eidley, " you could never be content in placing the
94 A Short History of
same, now cast, now north, now one way, now another, until it
pleased God of His goodness to place it clean out of the church."
The bishop, too, doubtless represented a very general feeling at
the time when he added: " A goodly receiving, I promise you, to set
an oyster table instead of an altar, and to come from puddings at
Westminster to receive."
But a stronger Calvinist even than Ridley now urged on the more
advanced party in the reforming direction. John Hooper, on April 7,
1550, was offered the bishopric of Gloucester and he refused it, because
of the oath he would be required to take under the New Ordinal,
which mentioned the saints of God ; but more especially because of
the vestments he would be required to wear, which he looked upon as
Aaronic abominations. " You have got rid of the Mass," he said,
"then rid yourself of the feathers of the Mass also." Some people
were not, however, prepared to sacrifice these ornaments at once.
There was some hesitation also, about letting Hooper be consecrated
on his own terms, and so matters remained for another year. By
that time ideas had advanced further on the down grade, and Cranmer
made him a bishop according to the New Ordinal on his own terms.
The destruction of altars sorely tried the consciences of many, and
in particular of some of the bishops still at liberty. It was a good
indication of the lengths to which the Reforming party had already
gone in destroying the old religion. Bishop Day of Chichester posi-
tively refused to obey a royal letter sent to him with peremptory
orders to see that all the altars in his diocese were destroyed at once
and tables substituted for them. On December 11, A.D. 1550, after
every means of inducing him to comply had been tried and had
failed, he was sent to join Bishops Bonner, Gardiner, Tunstall, and
Heath in prison. In February, 1551, Gardiner was declared incorri-
gible and his See of Winchester was taken from him and given
to a Reforming prelate, John Ponet, who was translated from the
See of Rochester.
The same year, 1551, the poor Princess Mary was much persecuted
for her determination on no account to have the new service in her
chapel. She had resolved to maintain the Sacrifice of the Mass, and
had up to this time managed to secure this. Now, however, one of
her chaplains, Dr. Mallet, was arrested for the second time and sent
to the Tower, in spite of Mary's protests, for offering up the Holy
the Catholic Church in England 95
Sacrifice in her chapel; whilst others were also arrested for being
present at it.
The time was now approaching for Cranmer to take his final
measures for the complete destruction of the old order. From
the date of its issue there is evidence to show that he was himself
dissatisfied with the First Prayer Book. He had by that time grown
out of his Lutheranism, and had come, as time went on, more and
more under the influence of Calvin and his adherents. Calvin wrote to
him from Geneva to be active while there was time, and to eradicate
the last traces of superstition; and Cranmer in return urged him
to ply King Edward with letters on the matter so as to hasten on the
movement. At length all was prepared. Parliament met in January,
1552, and on the first day a Bill was placed before the Lords to
compel people to come "to common prayer"; but before this could
pass, another Act was proposed for amending the First Prayer Book,
because doubts had arisen as to the meaning of the book. What
those doubts were cannot be doubtful. They were suggested by the
action of those who had tried to read the traditional Catholic doctrine
of the Eucharist into Cranmer's Lutheran formulary. Before the
Second Book of Common Prayer came into use, commissions were sent
out by the Council to seize all Church plate and vestments which had
been left in the churches after the first spoliation. November 1, 1552,
was the day appointed for the introduction of the new Service Book,
and up to the last moment there are evidences of changes being intro-
duced with the object of lowering the reverence hitherto shown by the
faithful to the Sacrament at its reception. As to the Book itself, it is
sufficient to say that it is undoubtedly Calvinistic in its conception and
doctrine. Even the slight outward similarity to the Mass, which the
Communion Service of the First Prayer Book had preserved, was
now obliterated. To use an expression of one who lived at the
time, the compilers of this new liturgy "had made a very hay of the
Mass." Of the ancient Canon, which the Apostolic See from the
earliest ages possessed and had kept inviolate, nothing was allowed
to survive. Great Popes like St. Leo and St. Gregory had inserted
a few words with fear and reverence into this sacred inheritance of
the Church. They would have considered it sacrilegious and impious
to alter or reject any part of it. Cranmer and the Edwardian Be-
formers felt no such scruple. They mutilated, altered, rejected, and
g6 A Short History of
inserted to their hearts' content, and finally they got rid of nearly
every portion of it. The outcome of their work may be studied in
the Anglican Communion Service to-day, which is substantially that
of the Prayer Book of A.D. 1552.
The work of destruction was completed, although even now there
were indications that further reformation was intended. Fortunately,
however, Edward VI. died on July 6, 1553, a few months only after
the Second Prayer Book had been in use.
the Catholic Church in England 97
MARY RESTORES THE OLD RELIGION
ON July 19, A.D. 1553, Queen Mary was proclaimed in London.
The fortnight which had elapsed since King Edward's death had
sufficed to secure the downfall of the Protestant party under the
Duke of Northumberland, and to terminate the nine days' reign of
their chosen ruler, Lady Jane Grey.
At the beginning, Queen Mary undoubtedly desired to be tolerant
towards those who professed the new religion. In a proclamation
issued on the day before she reached London, she urged her subjects
to live together "in quiet sort and Christian charity," and to avoid
making use of the " new found devilish terms of papist and heretic."
On this same day Northumberland and others were brought to trial,
and pleading guilty were condemned to death. On July 21st the
Duke attended Mass in the Tower, and, together with the Marquess
of Northampton and others, came before the altar and professed
that they all desired to die in the true Catholic faith ; the Duke
in particular called on all present to bear witness to his belief in
the Blessed Sacrament. The following day upon the scaffold he
made a similar profession, and asked Bishop Heath, his confessor,
to testify to the truth of his conversion.
In the matter she had so much at heart, the restoration of the
old religion, Mary desired to proceed with all caution. Some of
the acts of the late reign were speedily undone, as being unjust.
The appeals of Bishops Bonner and Tunstall against deprivation,
which they had made in vain during Edward's reign, were now
G
98 A Short History of
heard, and they were restored to their Sees. So also Bishops
Gardiner, Heath, and Day were again recognised legally as bishops,
and Bishop Voysey of Exeter was restored on the ground that,
although he had resigned, he was compelled to do so " by just fear
both of body and soul."
On September 23, 1553, Bishop Gardiner was made Chancellor,
and on the following day the Feast of St. Bartholomew the Latin
Mass was sung in " the Shrouds " at St. Paul's, and in at least two
other London parish churches, in response to the wishes and
feelings of the people. On Sunday, the 27th, the old service was again
used in the Cathedral itself, and in this and the following month
several solemn Dirges, or Offices of the Dead, were sung in the City
and at Westminster, with Requiem Masses at which prayers for
the souls of the departed were asked. All these things, however,
were indications of the goodwill of the people, since it was only on
the 21st of December following that Mass was sung as of old in all
churches by Act of Parliament.
Meanwhile, before the meeting of Parliament, the foreign Protestant
divines had hastened to leave London. Peter Martyr, whom
Cranmer had advised to save himself by flight, obtained a passport
from the Queen without any difficulty, as Mary had clearly no wish
whatever to persecute. Cranmer, who had committed himself more
seriously and had called special attention to himself by a prematurely
disclosed challenge to a religious disputation, was on September 14th
committed to the Tower on a charge of treason.
Parliament met on October 5, 1553. Meanwhile Mary had already
placed herself in communication with the Pope, and Cardinal Pole
had been nominated as legate. Four days also before the assembly of
Parliament the Queen had been crowned at Westminster by Bishop
Gardiner, having promised by her coronation oath, not only to
preserve all the liberties of the realm, but to maintain the rights
of the Holy See. The session of Parliament was opened, as of old, by
a Mass of the Holy Ghost, at which the Queen was present, and at
which Gardiner spoke explaining the need of unity in the Church of
God, and confessing that he had shared with the rest in the guilt
of schism. As regards the Church, the most important proceedings
of this Parliament reversed the legislation of Edward's reign con-
cerning the Sacraments, the Act of Uniformity, and the marriage of
the Catholic Church in England 99
priests. The Edwardine Church services, moreover, were tolerated
only until December the 20th. The Queen permitted a discussion
in the Houses about the title " Supreme Head of the Church of
England," given by Act of Parliament to the Sovereign. Her own
view was well known, for in the writs summoning Parliament it had
already been dropped.
On November 13, whilst Parliament was still sitting, Cranmer was
indicted with Lady Jane Grey and others for treason and, pleading
guilty, received sentence of death. Their attainders were confirmed
by Parliament just before it was dissolved, though for a time at least
the sentence was not carried into effect. So far as Cranmer was
concerned, however, by the sentence of death the See of Canter-
bury became vacant, and the jurisdiction passed into the hands of
the Dean and Chapter. Meanwhile the advanced Reformers, who
had taken refuge abroad, commenced to bombard England with
scurrilous and offensive productions against the Queen, the bishops,
and the Catholic religion. Nothing was too sacred to escape their
venomous invectives. At the same time the declaration of Mary's
intention to marry Philip was certainly unpopular, and so far
unfortunate. Insurrections of a more or less serious nature took
place in various parts of the country, which culminated in Wyatt's
rebellion. All of these caused a temporary interruption in the
negotiations for a complete return of England to union with Home.
The new year, 1554, witnessed many restorations of the old ritual
Several of the Edwardine bishops were deprived; some who had
been made bishops according to the new Ordinal having their
episcopal character ignored in the process. The married clergy were
removed from their cures, but a not inconsiderable number of
those who had been rightfully ordained, after doing penance and
separating from their wives, received new livings.
Parliament met at Oxford on April 2, to ratify the conditions of
marriage between the Queen and Philip, and at this time was held
the celebrated disputation on the Eucharist between Cranmer,
Ridley, Latimer, and the Catholics. The doctrine of the three
Reformers was naturally condemned, and they were later called upon
to retract. On July 12, 1554, Philip of Spain landed at Southampton,
and the Queen was married to him at Winchester by Bishop Gardiner
on the 25th of that month.
ioo A Short History of
In September, 1554, Bishop Bonner held an episcopal Visitation of
his diocese of London. The articles of inquiry were most minute,
and traversed the changes made by the acts of the late reign. The
bishop required to know whether everything had been done that
could be done to correct what had been put wrong. Was the priest
married? Had he received irregular or schismatical ordination?
Was there a proper stone altar, and did the parish supply the
necessary books, chalice, vestments, &c. ? Was the Blessed
Sacrament reserved in a pyx hung over the altar ? and other
questions of this kind, which several parishes objected to, not on the
ground that they were improper to ask, but because it had been
impossible by that time to carry out the changes required of them.
For one reason or another, the coming of Cardinal Pole was still
delayed. It was, perhaps, as well that this was so, since those who
were in possession of confiscated Church property were filled with
fears that reunion with Rome would necessarily mean the surrender
of these possessions to the ecclesiastical authorities. Pole was able
to assure them privately, however, that as the Church might alienate,
it might also surrender a right, and that for the good of religion She
was prepared to do so in this case. And so in November, A.D. 1554,
after Parliament had reversed the attainder which still stood on the
Statute roll against him, Pole landed in England. He was well
received, and on November 28, he met the Parliament and declared
to the members the object of his legation. The following day both
Houses joined in petitioning the King and Queen to obtain pardon
from the Pope for the acts of schism, and asked for reunion with
Rome. On St. Andrew's Day, November 30th, Pole, after an
appropriate address, pronounced the desired . absolution ; all even
the King and Queen kneeling to receive it. The country thus
returned to the unity of the Church Catholic.
Before the close of the 3'ear Convocation, which had received its
own absolution, amongst other things petitioned that Cranmer's
book on the Sacrament and the English Service Books might be
all destroyed, and that the Canon law should be restored and
enforced. At the same time, the old English heresy laws were
most unfortunately revived by Parliament. Then followed that
series of miserable executions and burnings which have left a
lasting legacy of prejudice against the name of Mary and her
the Catholic Church in England 101
advisers as well as against the Catholic Church, which the lapse
of three centuries has not been able to remove. " Preachers of this
sort " (i.e., the heroes of Foxe) writes Mr. Gairdner " Preachers of
this sort dared the fire and were prepared for it. The experience of
twenty years had encouraged them to believe that papal authority
was no authority at all. The experience of twenty years, on the
other hand, had convinced Mary and, no doubt, her subjects
generally, that defiance of papal authority had shaken the foundation
of all authority whatever. Rebellion and treason had been nourished
by heresy nay, heresy was the very root from which they sprang.
And it was really more important in the eyes of Mary to extirpate
the root than merely to lop off the branches. She had all possible
desire to show indulgence to the misguided if they could be brought
to a better state of mind ; and the bishops might, be trusted,
especially Bishop Bonner, to do their very utmost to dissuade the
obstinate from rushing on their fate Can it be wondered
at that the age considered ' erroneous opinions ' dangerous ? The
burning of heretics was a barbarous, old-fashioned remedy, but it is
not true that either bishops or the Government adopted it without
reluctance."
Among those that were executed under these savage laws were
Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer, and Hooper. Cranmer had already been
sentenced to death for high treason, but had been left to be tried as
a spiritual man. Had all three been put to death with Northumber-
land few people could have condemned the judgment, and the
same might be said of many others who suffered at this time and
who were really criminals as well as heretics. Cranmer at first
retracted his errors in the hopes of saving his life, and then finding
that this did not avail him, he retracted his retraction, and died
bravely at the stake on March 21, A.D. 1556.
Bishop Gardiner had passed away some months before, and on
January 1, 1556, Heath, Archbishop of York, succeeded him as
Chancellor. Cardinal Pole had meanwhile been appointed by the
Pope to succeed Cranmer in the See of Canterbury. As he was
only in deacon's orders, he was ordained priest by Archbishop Heath
on March 20, 1556, and celebrated Mass for the first time at
Greenwich, on St. Benedict's Day, March 21 the very day that
his predecessor suffered at Oxford. The next day, which was a
102 A Short History of
Sunday, he was consecrated bishop, and as his presence had been
necessary in England he had deputed one of his canons to petition
for his pallium. This he received in state at Bow Church on the
Lady Day following.
By this time a beginning had already been made hi restoring the
monastic system. In April, A.D. 1555, the Grey Friars were installed
in their old house at Greenwich, and the following year the
Dominicans were set up in the Church of St. Bartholomew the
Great in Smithfield. Nuns were again placed at Sion, Carthusians
at Sheen, and the Observants opened their old home at Southampton.
On November 21, 1556, Westminster had its Benedictine community
once more ; and Dr. Feckenham, an old monk of Evesham and late
Dean of St. Paul's, put on his habit again and became Abbot of the
reconstituted Abbey. There were dreams of other foundations,
amongst others of a restoration of Glastonbury, but this fell through
for want of funds.
The Parliament which met on January 20, 1558, is chiefly
memorable from the fact that an Abbot of Westminster and a Prior of
St. John of Jerusalem again sat in it. Before the end of the year all
hope of Mary's life being preserved till true religious peace had been
established in the kingdom was at an end. She passed away on
November 17, 1558, twelve hours before her friend, Cardinal Pole.
Mr. Gairdner's estimate of her reign may here profitably be given.
" History has been cruel to her memory. The horrid epithet ' bloody '
bestowed so unscrupulously, alike on her and on Bonner and Gardiner
and the bishops generally, had, at least, a plausible justification
in her case from the severities to which she gave her sanction;
though it was really not just, even to her. The spectacle of those
cruel proceedings in public and the enduring recollection of them
afterwards blotted out from the public mind what even at first was
but imperfectly known the painful trials which she herself had so
long endured at the hands of lawless persecutors ; yet it was just
such lawless persecutors who had deranged the whole system of
Church Government, and as Queen she endeavoured to suppress
them by means which, if severe, were strictly legal. Among the
victims, no doubt, there were many true heroes and really honest
men ; but many of them also would have been persecutors if they
had had their way. Most of them retained the belief in a Catholic
the Catholic Church in England 103
Church but rejected the Mass, and held by the services authorised
in Edward VI.'s reign. But, of course, this meant complete
rejection of an older authority higher, according to time-honoured
theory, than that of any King or Parliament which had never
been openly set aside until that generation."
104 A Short History of
XI
THE RELIGION AS BY LAW ESTABLISHED
A FEW hours only after Mary's death, on November 17, 1558, the
Commons were summoned to the bar of the House of Lords. There
Heath, Archbishop of York, proclaimed her sister, the Lady Elizabeth,
Queen. " Of her most lawful right and title to the crown," he said,
" none could make question." No voice was raised in opposition, and
a week later, when the new Queen made her entry into London, she
was met at Highgate by all the Catholic bishops, who knelt to do her
homage and profess their complete loyalty.
What the religious convictions of the Queen were was not at first
considered, and though there were strong reasons for supposing that
she would throw herself into the arms of the Reforming party, it was
thought that personally she was not troubled with any very strong
convictions 011 matters of religion. This seemed more than likely.
Under Edward VI. Elizabeth had professed his varied forms of
Protestantism; under her sister she had returned to the practice
of the Catholic religion, and, according to one contemporary account,
when the late Queen on her deathbed had conjured her to declare her
real convictions, Elizabeth is said to have "prayed God (that) the
earth might open and swallow her up alive if she were not a true
Roman Catholic." Whatever people may have thought then about
her religion, it did not prevent the popular reception of her as Queen ;
all parties, as she herself declared, united in receiving her with true
loyalty. This should be quite sufficient to disprove the silly story
that the Queen's subsequent attitude towards Catholics was caused at
the beginning of her reign by the Pope's refusal to accept her as
rightful Sovereign of England, and the consequent hostile reception
the Catholic Church in England 105
of her by English Catholics, in obedience to his voice. The Catholics
from the first, as represented by Archbishop Heath and all the bishops,
undoubtedly acknowledged her as the lawful successor of Queen Mary.
Moreover, only a few weeks after her accession, Sir Edward Carne
wrote from Rome to Cecil to inform him that the Pope, Paul IV., in
spite of the efforts of the French, had refused to declare himself against
her succession as Queen, and would be ready to recognise her if she
would first formally send to acquaint him of her accession.
Two days after her reception in London, on November 25, 1558, the
Imperial ambassador wrote to his master that "though no change had
yet been made in religion " that is, in hardly more than one week
from her accession it was easy to conjecture in what way lay her
desires and what she intended. This was at once made absolutely
clear by the constitution of her Council, in which, whilst retaining
thirteen of Mary's old advisers, she placed eight of her own, all well
known as favouring the " Reformed " religion. At the head of this
mixed Council she put the celebrated Sir William Cecil (afterwards
Lord Burleigh), to whom more than to any one else she owed the
complete success of her religious policy. By Cecil's advice a secret
Cabinet within the Cabinet was formed, consisting of himself and four
others upon whom he could implicitly rely, and by this means he and
Elizabeth were able to make all their plans for the change of religion
in secret and at their leisure. The general principle upon which they
acted, as stated by the Protestant historian Collier, was " that it was
by no means advisable to allow of more than one Church ; that the
free exercise of different religions would prove an everlasting principle
of sedition and disturbance."
That the Queen and Cecil had already made up their minds in the
first few weeks of the reign as to the peculiar form of national
religion which alone was to be tolerated, is certain. A paper of Sir
Thomas Smith, one of Cecil's chief lieutenants, is still in existence, in
which the whole scheme is drawn out in detail. It is a document
giving instructions to a select committee of Reformers, most of whom
were subsequently made Protestant bishops, to meet in December
and prepare for the coming "alteration of religion." The change
was to " be first attempted at the next Parliament," and great care
was required to have all ready, as it was recognised that "many
people of our own will be very much discontented," especially those
io6 A Short History of
" who governed in the late Queen's time" and were chosen "for being
hot and earnest in the other religion." To guard against this all
those who were in authority, " only or chiefly for being of the Pope's
religion," should be got rid of and if possible " searched by all law."
In their place were to be put " such as are known to be sure in
religion." And in regard to this, Elizabeth, " to maintain and
establish her religion," must 'do what Queen Mary did. As to the
existing bishops and clergy, the Queen " must seek, as well by
Parliament as by the just laws of England, in prcemunire and other
such penal laws, to bring them again into order," and not to pardon
until they throw themselves on her mercy, "abjure the Pope of Rome,
and conform themselves to the new alterations." A Committee was
then appointed to have " a plat or book " for the New Service " ready
drawn to Her Highness : which being approved of Her Majesty, may
be so put into the Parliament house." Meanwhile all innovations in
religious worship were to be prohibited; and "until such time as the
book came forth " no alterations were to be made " further than Her
Majesty hath, except it be to receive the Communion as Her High-
ness pleaseth, on high feasts. . . . And for Her Highness's conscience
till then, if there be some other devout sort of prayers or memory,
said; and the seldomer, Mass."
Meanwhile the funeral of the late Queen had been celebrated with
all the old Catholic ceremonies ; but Bishop White, who had preached
the funeral oration and had extolled Mary for her zeal in the restora-
tion of the ancient Faith of England, found himself in prison for his
boldness. Shortly after this the obsequies of the Emperor, Charles
V., were also celebrated at Westminster ; but here, if the Count de
Feria is correct, the celebrant was an heretical minister, who left out
the Pope's name in the Mass, said the Pater Noster in English, and
otherwise made innovations which were distasteful and shocking to
Catholic sentiment. Other signs of coming changes quickly followed.
The Reforming divines of course returned from abroad to England and
were appointed to various ecclesiastical positions. Bishop Oglethorpe,
of Carlisle, while robing for Mass on Christmas morning, received an
order from the Queen that he was not to elevate the Blessed
Sacrament in her royal presence. To this the bishop replied, " My
life is the Queen's, but my conscience is my own," intimating that he
should continue to do as the Catholic rites prescribed. The Queen
the Catholic Church in England 107
thereupon left the chapel with her suite after the Gospel. Towards
the end of the year all preaching was prohibited by royal proclama-
tion, which also required that certain portions of the service should be
read in English, and that " all such rites and ceremonies should be
observed in all parish churches of the kingdom as were then used and
retained in Her Majesty's chapel, until consultation might be had in
Parliament by the Queen and the three estates."
Within two months of Elizabeth's succession, then, there was no
longer room for doubt as to her intentions. As January 14, 1559,
had been appointed for the Queen's coronation at Westminster, the
bishops met and unanimously declared that in conscience they could
not officiate. They would not, they said, go through the ceremony of
anointing and crowning one who, though she still professed to belong
to the old religion, had shown unmistakable evidence of a determina-
tion to revolutionise the existing state of things, and re-establish the
religion's conditions of the reign of Edw T ard VI. At length, however,
the Bishop of Carlisle gave way and was induced by the Queen to
consent to place the crown on her head. But he did not do so until
she had promised to take the accustomed oath, by which she would
solemnly engage herself "to maintain the laws, honour, peace, and
privileges of the Church, as they existed in the time of King Edward
the Confessor." Elizabeth kept her word ; she attended Mass, took
the old oath, received the sacred unction, made her Communion
under one kind, and conformed in everything to the ancient rites of
the Catholic Pontifical.
On January 25, 1559, ten days after the coronation festivities,
Parliament met. As usual in Catholic times, it was opened by a
solemn Mass, at which Elizabeth was present, but by her direction
the sermon was preached by Dr. Cox, a notorious Protestant. The
first business transacted was the Parliament's formal recognition of
the Queen's right to the throne. Unlike Mary, who had been eager
to obtain a reversal of the Act by which her mother's marriage with
Henry VIII. was declared illegitimate, Elizabeth contented herself
with a declaration of her own royal descent, and left her mother,
Anne Boleyn, still under the stigma of incest, adultery, and treason.
As some one said, it seemed as if she desired to forget that she ever
had a mother, and only to remember that she was her father's daughter.
Before the new laws concerning religion were proposed, an Act was
io8 A Short History of
passed giving back to the Queen the firstfruits, which Mary had again
assigned to their old purpose of supporting the Pope. Elizabeth
also at the same time took possession again of the abbey lands and
other ecclesiastical property, that had been restored to the Church,
upon which she could lay her hands. When this had been done, the
Act of Royal Supremacy was immediately proposed for the acceptance
of Parliament. Its object was, of course, to do away with the spiritual
supremacy of the Pope and substitute that of the Crown, as had been
done before. Moreover, a stringent oath agreeing to this was to be
taken, when required, by every one, from the Archbishop of Canter-
bury to the parish beadle. No one henceforth could hold any office
in Church or State who would not renounce the jurisdiction of the
Pope and acknowledge the supremacy of the Crown. In other words,
every adherent of the old Faith was deliberately excluded from any
and every position if he did not deny his Faith and sacrifice his
conscience. " I desire," said one of the lay Catholics in the Commons
at the time " I desire it may be remembered that people who suffer
for refusing this oath are not to be considered as common malefactors,
thieves, and murderers. They don't offend from wicked intention
and malice prepense. No, it is conscience and good meaning which
makes them clash with the law."
Of the twenty-six English Sees ten were actually vacant in
A.D. 1559, and the brunt of the battle for the preservation of the
old religion fell upon the diminished number of bishops in the House
of Lords. To strengthen their hands Convocation met and drew up
a Declaration of Catholic Faith. This document is important and
interesting, if for no other reason than because it was the last solemn
pronouncement of the English Church before its final alteration.
By it the English Church affirmed its belief in the existence of the
"natural Body of Christ," under the species of bread and wine, " in
the Sacrament of the Altar, by virtue of the Word of Christ duly
spoken by the priest." It declared also its belief in Transubstantia-
tion and in the true Sacrificial character of the Mass ; also it affirmed,
11 that to Blessed Peter and to his lawful successors in the Apostolic
See, as Vicars of Christ, has been given the supreme power of feeding
and ruling the Church of Christ upon earth, and of confirming their
brethren." The English Universities also gave in their adherence to
these articles.
the Catholic Church in England 109
The three Acts of Parliament by which the religion of the country
was changed and the Elizabethan settlement effected were : (1) The
Act for the Kestoration of Tenths to the Crown; (2) the Act of
Supremacy; and (3) the Act of Uniformity, which authorised and
imposed the Eeformed Prayer Book. The bishops fought each of
these Bills step by step, and unanimously voted against them. The
old story that the intention of Queen Elizabeth's Government was to
introduce the First Prayer Book of A.D. 1549 is disproved by facts.
From the first, with three slight modifications, the liturgy adopted by
the Queen's committee, half the members of which had been among
the German and Swiss Protestants during the late reign, and the rest
were well known as earnest and advanced Keformers, was the Prayer
Book of A.D. 1552. This was introduced into Parliament in March,
1559. The authorities were foiled in their first attempt to force it
through; how or why does not appear. They were not, however,
baffled, and on March 17th a new Bill was proposed : " That no
person shall be punished for using the religion used in King Edward's
last year." This was pushed through the House in two days, and
was more than the thin edge of the wedge. After Easter had passed, in
April, the proposed Book was re-introduced and carried on April 28th
by a bare majority of three votes, and without the support of a single
spiritual Peer. The famous speech of Bishop Scot and that of
Abbot Feckenham, in which they challenged the world to produce a
single instance where the bishops were not consulted and listened to
in a controversy of this kind, were the last constitutional efforts made
by the old religion to stay the innovations. That their weighty
arguments were not wholly unheeded may be judged by the very
narrow majority which carried the religious revolution. Had there
not been so many Sees vacant at this time there can be no reasonable
doubt that the intentions of the Government, for a time at least,
would have been defeated, and the new Prayer Book rejected. As it
was, however, the Elizabethan settlement rested upon the infallibility
of the odd three.
The Act of Uniformity did more, of course, than sanction the
Protestant Prayer Book. It made its use obligatory under grave
penal enactments. Any clergyman who did not use it was fined for
the first offence, deprived of his benefice for the second and im-
prisoned for life for the third. All persons absenting themselves from
I io A Short History of
Church on Sundays were to be fined for each offence, and the
amount of the fine increased as time went on. This Act and that of
Supremacy formed the basis of the restrictive code of laws, which,
as Hallam says, " pressed so heavily for more than two centuries upon
the adherents to the Eomish Church."
No sooner was the Elizabethan settlement of religion accomplished by
these Acts of the Parliament of 1559 than the Queen issued a set of
injunctions, which were probably the work of Cecil. The com-
missioners appointed to carry them out were, with one exception,
laymen ; yet they received ample powers to visit and reform all
cathedrals and churches and to inquire into the faith, &c., of the
bishops and clergy ; to induct to benefices, to convene synods and to
perform every episcopal and sacerdotal function except that of
Ordination, Consecration and the administration of the Sacraments.
Before the December of this year, 1559, the bishops had all been dealt
with by these commissions. They were put to the test of the new
oath of Supremacy, and all unhesitatingly refused, with the exception
of Kitchen of Llandaff, whom Godwin calls " the shame and reproach
of his See." Those who were constant to the old Faith, to the number
of fifteen, were deprived and most of them imprisoned more or less
strictly. The exceptions were Scot of Chester, Pate of Worcester,
and Goldwell of St. Asaph, who escaped abroad.
Thus with one exception the whole of the Catholic Hierarchy had
been deposed in one batch by the civil power, and placed in, what
Camden euphemistically calls, "free custody." No doubt some only
of them underwent the rigours of the prison dungeon ; but it may be
questioned whether to them enforced detention for years in the
houses of the new bishops, with the obligation of consorting with
their wives and families, would not have been more distasteful and
more personally degrading than the stricter confinement of prison
walls.
After the bishops, came the turn of the clergy. The first Visita-
tion, made in 1559 for the purpose of tendering the oath, was so barren
of results that after it had lasted six months it was abandoned in
December. In brief, it may be said that the purpose of the visitors
was mainly defeated by the majority of the clergj' refusing to attend
according to their summons. In the province of York, out of ninety
priests summoned only twenty-one took the oath, thirty-six came
the Catholic Church in England 1 1 1
and refused it, seventeen were absent. In the province of Canter-
bury whole bodies like the Dean and Canons of Winchester, the
Warden and Fellows of the College, and the Master of St. Cross all
refused the oath. For the whole province the visitors omit the
absentees and give the number 786 conformists and 49 recusants.
Out of 8,911 parishes and 9,400 beneficed clergymen only 806 took
the oath. It is probable that in the north and west of England in
particular many of the Catholic clergy were left undisturbed till
three years later, when a second Visitation was ordered. At that time
many of the married clergy ousted by Mary were reinstated, and the
large number of vacant benefices attested the loyalty of great numbers
to the old Faith, and compelled the authorities to ordain to the
ministry that motley crowd of new clergy described by Prebendary
Heylin in his History. This also alone explains why, as Hallam
says, "for several years it was the common practice to appoint
laymen, usually mechanics, to read the Service in the vacant
churches."
The entire bench of bishops having been got rid of, it became
necessary to devise means to supply their places, for Elizabeth and her
Council, unlike the foreign sectaries, decided that the " Settlement"
scheme should include bishops as well as ministers. It was
apparently, indeed, for a time undecided whether this distinction
should be kept, but ultimately for many reasons it was arranged
that it should be. These bishops, even to satisfy the scruples of the
popular conscience if for no other, must be consecrated, but the
difficulty of obtaining consecration was somewhat serious. An Arch-
bishop by the law had to be consecrated by an Archbishop or by four
bishops, and, as Cecil wrote at the time, " there is no Archbishop and
no four bishops, what is to be done ? " The various commissions that
were issued show the straits to which the Government were reduced.
Finally, however, the foundation of the new Hierarchy was constituted
by the consecration of Archbishop Parker. Bishop Barlow, whose own
consecration must always be doubtful, officiated, and two Edwardine
bishops, with Hodgkins, a suffragan consecrated under the old rite,
assisted at the ceremony, which was performed according to the
Ordinal of Edward VI. Parker without delay filled up the other
vacant Sees, and the Elizabethan Settlement of religion was com-
pleted. Whatever invalidity there might have been was legally
LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE
112 A Short History of
supplied by the sovereign in virtue of the plenitude of jurisdiction
which was considered to reside in her.
The rest of Elizabeth's reign, so far as Catholics are concerned, is
mainly a record of persecution. Once in 1569, in the northern parts,
they rose in defence of the Faith of their ancestors, and for a tune
they rnet with success. Their minds were swayed by religious
fervour ; they were all Catholics at heart, as the Queen's agent in the
North wrote : " There are not in all this country ten gentlemen that
do favour and allow of Her Majesty's proceedings in the cause of
religion." Durham was the scene of their first act of hostility, and
there the Communion table was thrown down and Mass was cele-
brated again in the old cathedral, in the presence of many thousand
people. But the reverse came quickly, and the usual Tudor execu-
tions restored the Queen's power, and the memory of " rivers of
blood" long remained as an object-lesson to the dissatisfied. Those
who were pardoned only secured it by renouncing their religion and
taking the oath of Supremacy.
Events took place in the second half of the century which con.
siderably aggravated Protestant hatred for Catholics and led to the
passing of penal laws of ever-increasing severity, in A.D. 1571, 1581,
1585, 1587, 1593. The pathetic position of Mary Queen of Scots excited
the pity and compromised the safety of many English Catholics,
who, however sympathetic, were falsely supposed to be endeavouring
to compass Elizabeth's death to secure the accession of the Catholic
Mary. But what more than all else called up the rigours of perse-
cution against the adherents of the old religion was the foundation of
the seminaries abroad for the education of Catholic missionaries.
This movement, which originated with the opening of Dr. Allen's
Doway Seminary in 1568, led to the creation of many other centres
for the same purpose abroad, such as at Valladolid, Lisbon, Seville,
St. Omers, and later at Rome itself. Cecil quickly realised what
this meant. He had counted on the gradual extinction of the old
Marian priesthood and the consequent dying out of the old Faith
among a people left without priest or teacher. The creation of these
seminaries entirely upset his calculations ; from them were con-
stantly being poured into the country zealous and single-minded men
by the score and the hundred, who did much more than supply the
place of the clergy who were dying out. In 1580 the first Jesuits
the Catholic Church in England 1 1 3
found their way into England, and they were followed in a continual
stream by other members of the same order. From this time the
persecution began in earnest.
What contributed greatly to increasing the trials of the English
Catholics was the embarrassing and painful excommunication pro-
nounced against Elizabeth in 1571 by Pope Pius V. It furnished
the Government of the time with a weapon they were not slow to
use, and it made it appear as if a political offence might be considered
at least as part of the religious offence of their Faith. Henceforth
Catholics for being Catholics were treated and punished as traitors.
For the last twenty years of this reign, every year, with only one
exception, there were numerous executions for religion in England.
Most of those who suffered death were priests, and there are recorded
the names of nearly two hundred of these martyrs for conscience
and duty. Thousands of men and women were also punished by
fines and imprisonment for their refusal to obey the statutes
passed to secure the Queen's religious Settlement, and these
underwent a slow martyrdom under the pressure of the recusancy
laws, compared with which even the scaffold would often have
been a relief. Nor must it be forgotten that all during the latter
part of the sixteenth century the rack, the thumbscrew, the Sca-
venger's-daughter, the Little Ease, and other tortures, were being
constantly requisitioned to convert " papists " from the error of their
ways to the new Protestant religion as by law established. But it
was a battle for conscience' sake. To them, as has been said, " it
was the Mass that mattered," and how could they consent to attend
a service which had been designedly drawn up as a rejection of the
Mass altogether, even when refusal meant the sacrifice of all their
possessions, with prospective imprisonment and torture '? " It was the
Mass that mattered," and to that the persecuted people clung. " It
fills me with amazement," writes Father Parsons in 1580 from
England, " when I behold and reflect upon the devotion which
Catholics in England show by gestures and behaviour at Mass ;
for they are overpowered by such a sense of awe and reverence
that . . . when the Lord's Body is elevated they weep so abun-
dantly as to draw tears, even involuntarily, from my dry and
parched eyes."
U4 A Short History of
XII
TWO CENTURIES OF PERSECUTION
THE story of the Catholic Church in England cannot be concluded
with A.D. 1559 and the triumph of the Reformation. The attempted
destruction of the old Faith and the establishment by law of the Pro-
testant religion, it is true destroyed the Catholic Hierarchy and trans-
ferred the legal possession of the cathedrals and other churches from
the old owners to the new, and structurally adapted them, by the
destruction of altars, roods and images, &c., to the new non- sacrificial
liturgy. But the Catholic Church survived the storm and stress of
Elizabeth's days, and that they did so excites to-day our admiration
for and wonder at our brave Catholic ancestors. Unfortunately they
were divided in many matters of policy amongst themselves, and for
a long period, through the influence of some parties at Rome, the
Catholics of England were left without the help of bishops. In fact,
until A.D. 1581 there was really no head save the successors of St.
Peter. In that year Gregory XIII. appointed Dr. Allen " Prefect of
the English Mission," and until his death in 1595 he contrived, as
best he could, to administer the ecclesiastical business from abroad.
Allen appears, moreover, once at least, to have visited England
during this time. He went about the Catholic homes of Lanca-
shire making the heads of families swear never to take part in the
Protestant services, and so saved the Faith at least in Lancashire.
From 1598 to 1621 the Church in England was administered by Arch-
priests ; after that time for more than two centuries by Vicars-
Apostolic.
The bare lists of executions, rackings, and imprisonments can give
but a very inadequate idea of the sufferings endured with heroic
the Catholic Church in England 1 1 5
constancy by the Catholics during the last quarter of the sixteenth
century. It is impossible to sketch any picture which can give a
proper notion of the life they must have led ; constant alarms,
torturing suspense, mental agony was the lot of whole multitudes
from week to week for years together. No one was safe. Visitations
and searches by the priest-hunters looking for their prey ; information
lodged in secret ; frequent attendance at meetings of commissioners
and magistrates for the purpose of cross-examination ; detention in
gaol or confinement to the precincts of a house or estate, was the
common fortune of those that were staunch to the old Faith. But
worst of all must have been the amount of privation and positive
destitution and ruin caused by the exaction of the fines for refusing
to come to Church. None but the rich could afford to pay '2Q a
month (at thirteen months to the year) " for refusing to come to
Church where Common Prayer is said," and they only did it by
sacrificing and selling their estates. During the last twenty years of
Elizabeth's life she actually received in hard cash from this source
120,305 19s. 7^d., a vast sum for those days. Every time also Catho-
lics could be proved to have heard Mass there was a fine of a hundred
marks, and they were liable to great penalties and even to be hanged
as felons. On any special occasion they could be lodged in the
nearest county gaol at their own expense, had to pay double tax, and
were frequently placed under the watchful care of their Protestant
neighbours, or forbidden to stir more than five miles from their
homes without a licence of the bishop of the diocese or the deputy-
lieutenant, on pain of forfeiting their goods and all the profits of
their lands for life.
The marvel is that the measures taken by the Government did
not succeed in " eradicating popery " from England. That it did
not was not the fault of the executive. They did their best. In 1584
Bishop Cooper found the number of recusants in his diocese so great
that he advised drastic measures. His plan was " that a hundred or
two of the obstinate recusants, lusty men, well able to labour,"
should be shipped over to Flanders as convict labourers. And in the
same year the Clerk of the Peace for the county of Hampshire
states that " at every session the indictments against " the recusants
are at least one hundred and forty, and he adds that both his time
and that of the magistrates is chiefly taken up over these religious
ii6 A Short History of
prosecutions. It was the same all over England, and, when at the
close of the reign after the penal laws had done their worst, there
were some that reckoned the adherents of the old religion still as the
majority in the nation.
One word must be said about the attempt made at the close of the
sixteenth century, which has indeed been revived since, to minimise
the cruelty of Elizabeth's executions on the ground that the priests
suffered not for their religion, but for treason. Hallam long ago
protested against the needless addition of insult to injury, and the
non-Catholic authority, Mr. Beesly, declares that these " attempts to
excuse such legislation as prompted by political reasons can only
move the disgust of every honest-minded man." " To say," writes
Sydney Smith, that because " a law is passed making it high treason
for a priest to exercise his functions in England," when a priest is
caught and executed, that " this is not religious persecution," but
the just punishment of an offence against the State, is absurd. " We
are, I hope, all too busy to need any answer to such childish, uncandid
reasoning as this."
Hopes of better treatment had been raised among the Catholics
by the accession of James I. in March, 1603. It seems certain that
chance expressions of the King had led them to believe that some form
of toleration would be extended to them. These expectations were soon
doomed to be disappointed ; James re-enacted the penal laws, and
this has been assigned as the cause leading up to what has been known
as the Gunpowder Plot. How far the conspiracy of a few individuals
furnished the Government with the material upon which to embroider
all the traditional horrors and minute details need not be here
discussed. It is sufficient to point out that it is now admitted that
the Catholics, as Professor Eawson Gardiner says, " were subjected
to a persecution borne with the noblest and least assertive constancy,
simply in consequence of what is now known to all historical students
to have been the entirely false charge that the plot emanated from,
or was approved by " them " as a body." The result to Catholics
was, as might have been foreseen, disastrous ; fines were increased,
or more carefully exacted, and new means of subjecting the adherents
of the old religion to petty persecutions of all sorts were invented.
All was borne, we are told by the authority on this period as quoted
above, " with the noblest and least assertive constancy."
the Catholic Church in England 1 1 7
Matters might have been rendered less difficult for the unfortunate
English Catholics had they been permitted, at this time, to take an
oath of allegiance to James. The terms of the declaration which
denied the " deposing power " of the Pope was fully approved by the
Archpriest Black well and many other ecclesiastics. The question
was referred to Eome and the Pope refused his consent. Despair
seized upon many of the Catholics and not a few conformed to the
Established Church.
The marriage of Charles I. to Henrietta Maria, a Catholic, gave
better courage and some heart to the Catholics. For the first time
for many years Mass was said publicly both in the Queen's chapel,
and in the chapels of the various ambassadors, at which large numbers
assisted. Papal envoys were also received at the Court, and did some-
thing to better the conditions of the Catholics, but little else. Panzani,
one of them, was chiefly instrumental in obtaining the appointment
of a bishop. All this time the Sacrament of Confirmation had not
been administered in the country, and the Holy Oils for Extreme
Unction and Baptism had been obtained from Flanders or the Low
Countries as opportunity served. The Papal envoy found, as he cal-
culated, that there were about 150,000 Catholics in England. A great
variety of opinions existed even amongst the faithful as to what was
lawful and what was not. For instance, the payment of Easter dues
to the Established Church was a great source of difficulty, as the
receipt implied that the person who paid had already communicated
at the Protestant Communion service. The oath of allegiance, too,
was another source of doubt and disagreement. There was no talk
of any oath of Supremacy: that had been dropped altogether for
Catholics ; but the King demanded the oath of allegiance, and there
was a very large party in favour of taking it ; others were equally
strong against it, and the authorities at Rome sided with the latter.
On the approach of the civil war Charles appealed to his Catholic
subjects, and through his Queen he promised to remove all penal
statutes if they would support him. This they did with unanimous
loyalty, which upon the success of the Parliamentarians did not
improve their condition during the Commonwealth. On the Restora-
tion, however, Charles II. wished to requite their fidelity to the
Stuart cause by granting toleration, but the anti-Catholic feeling was
altogether too strong, various circumstances having just at this time
u8 A Short History of
tended to aggravate it. Every misfortune and calamity was popularly
attributed to the luckless " papist." The inscription on the monu-
ment commemorating the Fire of London may be taken as an instance.
The misfortune was ascribed to "the treachery and malice of the
Popish faction." Charles did what he could, and, besides proposing
an Emancipation Bill he persistently refused to consider the Bill
which was intended to exclude his brother James, Duke of York,
from the succession. But the bitter and unreasoning hostility to
Catholics grew rather than diminished towards the close of his
reign, and as one of the results of the infamous fictions of Titus
Gates, two thousand persons were imprisoned on suspicion of being
implicated in a plot, and a number of priests and laymen suffered
death as traitors on his perjured statements. The two last Catholics
to fall victims to their religious convictions were William Howard,
Viscount Stafford, in 1680, and Oliver Plunket, Archbishop of Armagh,
the following year. In 1685 Charles II. died, having received the
grace of conversion, and before his death being received into the
Catholic Church by Father Huddleston.
James, Duke of York, succeeded his brother as James II. at a most
unfortunate time for Catholics. It would have required great tact
and prudence, as well as the capacity for waiting on opportunities, to
do any good whatever to the cause that the King had at heart, the
restoration of the Catholic religion. James possessed none of these
qualities. He was a Stuart; incapable of understanding or even
seeing difficulties, of yielding his will, or of tolerating other views but
his own. It is impossible to imagine a more foolish policy than he
from the first adopted. During the four short years he occupied the
throne, he contrived to arouse the distrust of all his subjects, and
certainly left an increased legacy of difficulties to the Catholics \vhen,
in 1688, Dutch William had established himself on the throne of
England.
Within a few years of the accession of William of Orange, new
penal laws against the unfortunate "papists" were passed by the
Commons, which seemed to promise the speedy extirpation of English
Catholicism. "The experience of Elizabeth's reign," says a writer
on this period, " had shown that the infliction of actual death roused
a life-giving enthusiasm among Catholics themselves and sympathy
in the witnesses of their sufferings. The penal system now introduced
the Catholic C/mrck in England 1 1 9
was the preference for gagging a man, binding him hand and foot,
bandaging his eyes, and imprisoning him for life, rather than killing
him outright."
It was now made a crime for a Catholic to possess arms or a horse
above 5 in value. Perpetual imprisonment was to be the punish-
ment for saying Mass or keeping a school. Every informer who
could secure the apprehension of a priest was to receive a reward
of 100. Catholics were declared incapable of inheriting lands,
and the next of kin who was a Protestant could claim the inheritance,
and a Catholic could not purchase lands or estates after April 10, 1700.
Such are some few of the penal enactments by which the new policy
of William strove to destroy the last remnant of the faithful adherents
to the old Faith of their fathers.
For the next century the history of Catholicism in this country
is the story of one long, patient, but determined endurance. Theirs
was the attitude of a man conscious of innocence, but condemned to
lifelong solitary confinement, who nerves himself to resist either death
or loss of reason. It is indeed hardly possible to exaggerate the
hopeless condition to which Catholics were reduced by this new
system of repression. While the statute book still recorded laws
against his property, his liberty, and even against his life, which were
held in terror over him, and which at times through spite or religious
fanaticism were even invoked against him, he was sedulously shut out
from all participation in the national life of his country, and all
professions were equally barred against him. At first, and for a
generation or two, Catholics had struggled to free themselves from the
strong grip of the State upon their throats, which was intentionally
choking the life out of them. Like a suffocating man under like con-
ditions, some did not stop to think whether their efforts to free them-
selves were either right or politic, or could be justified by the cut-and-
dried principles of casuistry. It is easy for us who do not feel the
strong arm of the law ever threatening our existence to criticise and
condemn the action of this or that individual amongst them, who,
when they and others lay helpless, and writhing and dying, thought
to make terms which would let them breathe again and give them
back life and hope. But before the close of this period even these
bids for liberty were things of the past. Hope had departed from the
breasts of Catholics, and almost the only prayer which, in the records
I2O A Short History of
of that terrible time, the historian can recognise as uttered by that
rapidly dwindling body, is one for resignation and for the grace to be
at least left to die in peace.
There were, of course, exceptions ; but gloom and despair seein
to have settled down as a black cloud over English Catholics
from the middle of the eighteenth century. Those who persisted
in acting and agitating were looked upon, even by those for whom
they fought and strove, as dangerous disturbers of a tacit truce, and
as men who by their indiscretions might well bring down again upon
the heads of all the rigours of active persecution. Sad indeed
terribly sad is the lot of that band of the faithful few at that time.
In all the chronicles of history I know of no page which records a
more touching and more heartrending story than that of this yearly
diminishing remnant of those who had never bowed their knees to
Baal, who had undergone the long-drawn agony of a life martyrdom
for the Faith of their fathers.
Hope itself had well nigh departed: and in the darkest hours
that went before the dawn of better times the thoughts of many
hearts were but little removed, except by resignation to God's
will, from blank despair. Still some souls chafed at the situation and
at the precarious condition in which they found themselves. " Shall
I," wrote one of them " shall I sit down silently satisfied, because the
good humour of the magistrate chooses to indulge me, whilst there
are laws of which any miscreant has daily power to enforce the
execution ? My ease, my property, and my life are at the disposal of
every villain, and I am to be pleased because he is not at this time
disposed to deprive me of them. To-inorrow his humour may vary,
and I shall then be obliged to hide my head in some dark corner, or to
fly from this land of boasted liberty."
In A.D. 1778 Sir George Savile carried in Parliament a Relief
Bill for Catholics, which was intended to redress some of the most
glaring items of legal injustice which Catholics had long endured with
all the fortitude of Christian martyrs. It did not effect much, but it
was the beginning, and " it shook the general prejudice against
Catholics to the centre. It restored to them a thousand indescribable
charities in the ordinary intercourse of social life which they had
seldom experienced." To obtain relief under this Act the Catholic
was required to take an oath abjuring the Pretender, rejecting
the Catholic Church in England 121
the deposing power of the Pope, and condemning the doctrine,
supposed to be taught in the Roman schools, that faith need not
be kept with heretics, and that ail such heretics could at any time
be lawfully put to death. It is difficult to imagine that an oath
of this kind could ever have presented any difficulty to the mind of an
English Catholic, except in so far as it was a reflection upon his
intelligent apprehension of his religion. Yet it was precisely here
that the difficulty of arriving at any modus vivendi had lain for
generations. Now, however, the Vicars-Apostolic accepted the con-
ditions, and as a sign of this on June 4, 1778, they ordered public
prayers to be said in all churches for the King.
This very small measure of justice provoked an anti-Catholic agita-
tion which culminated in the Gordon riots. It is in the attitude of
many Catholics at this time of trial that we have revealed to us in the
most striking manner the pitiable condition to which the long-
endured persecution had reduced them. The laity were, with some
exceptions, afraid of courting observation and reckoned their obscurity
to be their security. They hardly dared to show their faces for fear of
the law being called in to lash them back to their hiding-places.
According to one who lived at the time, and had every means of knowing
the facts, "they were very prudent, very cautious, very provident
and very timid. . . . When the tumults of last summer (1780)
was raging in the metropolis" their voice "was heard tremblingly
giving counsel : * For God's sake,' they said, ' let us instantly petition
Parliament to repeal this obnoxious Bill ; it is better to confess
that we are guilty of all the crimes laid to our charges than to be
burnt in our homes.' They even dared to carry about a form
of petition to that effect praying for the signature of names. ' We
told you,' continued they, ' what would be the event of your addresses
to the throne, your oaths of allegiance, and your repeal of laws.' "
This, however, was the turning-point, and twenty years later
Catholics had already begun to understand the advantages even
of toleration, and had by their organised agitation and above all
by the help extended to them from Ireland secured other measures of
liberty. Looking back upon the time that was then happily past,
the great Daniel O'Connell, addressing the Catholic gentry, said: " My
thoughts turn to that period in your history when religious dissension
assembled all its elements together and scattered to the wind the Faith
122 A Short History of
and ritual of your forefathers. Sad, indeed, since that time has been
the record of religion and its sufferings in England. He who would
follow it seems to see himself as though present at a shipwreck where
nought may be discerned on every side but scattered and disjointed
fragments but still the hull was left ; it was the heart of oak, and
while that survived there was hope for those who clung to it. I
know well how difficult the position of Catholics has hitherto been,
how constantly against them the efforts of the persecutor had
been directed ; how for three centuries, indeed, they had borne
the whole weight of oppression which crushed down their Catholic
fellow-countrymen even to the dust, the blood of their noblest
members rendered its own red testimony upon the scaffold, in devoted
vindication of that Faith which the first missionaries to these shores had
preached to their ancestors. . . . Others indeed survived, but it
was only to endure a lingering martyrdom never to cease but with the
natural duration of life itself. More happy far were those whose
martyrdom was consummated on the scaffold, for them at least their
sufferings were ended, and they entered at once into their reward
in bliss. But the less fortunate survivors saw themselves doomed,
without reprieve, to lives of suffering, contumely, and ignominy
of every kind at the hands of the basest and most ignoble of
their Protestant countrymen. And they stood it nobly ! "
the Catholic Church in England 123
XIII
THE SECOND SPRING
WHAT happened after the centuries of persecution is best described
under the title of Cardinal Newman's immortal sermon, preached at
the first Synod of the Catholic Church held in England since the days
of Cardinald Pole. Succisa virescit : though cut down and stripped
of its ancient external glory, the sap began to rise and the old trunk
put forth again leaf and bud and bloom, the promise of a new and
fruitful life, It was indeed a " Second Spring."
To understand the change it is necessary to know something of the
state to which the persecution had reduced the Catholic Church in
England. In 1780, according to the only statistics available, English
Catholics numbered only 69,376, but Joseph Berington, who lived at
the time and had every means of knowing, considered that this esti-
mate was too high and that in reality they were not more than 60,000.
Of this number the Bishop of Chester, who be it remembered strongly
advocated Catholic Emancipation in 1778, claimed to have in his
diocese, which included Lancashire, 27,228 ; or about two-fifths of
the entire Catholic population of the country. It was at this same
time estimated that, in the twenty years between 1760 and 1780,
whilst the general population of the diocese of Chester had greatly
increased, the Catholics had also increased, but only by 2,089. In the
rest of England, however, there had been a decrease in their numbers.
In many of the dioceses there are said in the returns made to Parlia-
ment not to have been fifty Catholics, and in some not even ten. At
this period the total population of England and Wales was estimated
124 A Short History of
at some 6,000,000. In other words in 1780 the Catholics formed little
more than 1 per cent of the English people.
The particulars which Berington collected are most distressing
reading. In the West of England, South Wales, and some of the
Midland counties, he says, " there is scarcely a Catholic to be found."
The residences of the priests gtwe the best indication of the where-
abouts of Catholics, and, after London, the greatest number of clergy
were in Lancashire, Staffordshire, and in the northern counties.
Some large manufacturing towns such as Norwich, Manchester,
Liverpool, Wolverhampton, and Newcastle had chapels which were
reported to be rather overcrowded. Except in the larger towns and
in Lancashire the chief situation of Catholics was in the neighbour-
hood of old families who had remained faithful. They were mainly
the servants and children of servants who had married from these
families and who chose to remain round the old mansion for the
convenience of religious exercises and because they hoped for the
favour and help of their late masters.
In the opinion of the same writer, who had taken considerable
pains to arrive at the truth, Catholics had rapidly decreased in
numbers during the eighteenth century, and the shrinkage was still
going on in 1780. Many congregations, he says, have disappeared
altogether, and in one district " with which I am acquainted eight
out of thirteen missionary centres are come to nothing, nor have new
ones risen to make up in any proportion for their loss."
As to priests, Berington puts them at about 360 in the whole of
England, " which I think," said he, " is accurate." In 1781, the year
Berington wrote, in the Midland District there were fourteen mis-
sionary stations vacant, and some families had to go five and even ten
miles to church. Catholicity in the whole district was declining,
and Catholics were only 8,460, and hardly more than two-thirds of
the number they had been thirty or forty years before. The Western
District comprised eight English counties, together with North and
South Wales, This vast field of labour had only forty-four priests to
work in it, and this number appears to have been adequate to the
needs, as the Catholics are said to have been only " very few." Even
the London District, which extended over nine counties in the South
of England, is reported in 1780 to have only fifty-eight priests to
serve for all purposes. There were then five places vacant for which
the Catholic Church in England 125
no priest could be found, and the Catholics were reported to be dying
out except in the metropolis.
As for schools, the mitigation in the penalties for keeping such
establishments did not for some years lead to any visible increase in
their number. In 1780 Berington knew of only three boys' schools of
any note : " one in Hertfordshire (that is, at Standon, afterwards Old
Hall), one near Birmingham in Warwickshire (Baddesley Clinton), and
one near Wolverhampton " (Cotton or Sedgley Park). In London he
records the existence of some small schools for boys, adding " in other
parts there may be perhaps little establishments where an old woman
gives lectures on the Horn-book and the art of spelling." For girls,
the same authority only knew of the two long- established schools, one
at Hammersmith and the other at York.
Such was the melancholy position of Catholics at the time of
the Gordon riots. The bolder spirits among them were, however, not
daunted by that outburst of fanaticism which the small measure of
relief had called forth from the latent Protestantism of the land.
They continued their agitation, and in February, 1788, a committee of
English Catholics appealed directly to Pitt to help them. Pitt replied
by asking them first to collect evidence of the teaching of the
recognised Catholic Universities as to the " deposing power of the
Pope." This they did, and obtained from the Sorbonne, Doway,
Louvain, Salamanca and elsewhere declarations against that opinion.
Acting 'upon this the great body of Catholics, including the Vicars-
Apostolic and almost all the clergy, signed their protestation against
this teaching. This led in 1791 to a further measure of relief, by
which the legal profession, from barrister downwards, was thrown open
to Catholics, and some of the most irksome provisions of the still
existing penal statutes were annulled. The Vicars -Apostolic issued
letters upon the passing of the Bill saying that people could with safe
conscience take the required oath. The Catholic Directory of 1792
sets forth the approved form of solemn declaration which explicitly
rejects the "deposing power of the Pope "and the supposed Roman
teaching, that faith was not to be kept with heretics.
The further progress of emancipation was only a question of time.
Many influences were at work on the minds of English statesmen,
which assisted the unwearied efforts of a band of English Catholics,
who were determined to carry the full measure of justice, in spite of
126 A Short Hist or v of
every obstacle put in their way. The French Revolution came as an
object-lesson to politicians, and made them see that the Catholic
Church in reality made for law and order, and that its principles
were opposed to the spirit of revolution and anarchy which seemed
to have gained so serious a foothold in Europe generally. During
the pontificates of Benedict XJV. and his three immediate successors,
the influence of the Catholic priesthood had been uniformly employed
to support authority, whilst, as Mr. Lecky points out, nearly all the
political insurrections had been among those professing Protestant
principles. Edmund Burke, too, used the power of his eloquence in
favour of the Catholic cause, and, pointing to the attitude of the
French revolutionary party towards the Church, said : " If lihe
Catholic religion is destroyed by the infidels, it is a most contemptible
and absurd idea that this or any other Protestant Church can survive
the event."
The hospitality extended by England to the French exiles, and in
particular to the Catholic priests, did much to familiarise the people
generally with Catholics and Catholic clergy, and to teach them that
many of the stories they had been taught to believe about us and our
religion were obviously untrue in fact. In September and October,
1792, more than 6,000 French bishops and clergy had been received
in England, and this number was subsequently increased to 8,000.
Collections for their support were made in every Protestant parish
church in England, and at one time there were 660 lodged at the
public expense in the old Royal Palace at Winchester.
All this had a real, though perhaps at the time an unsuspected,
influence upon the fate of the English Catholics. Then came the
pressure put on Pitt by his Irish supporters, which in 1801 led to his
proposal for a full measure of Catholic emancipation. This failed for
a time through the King's refusal to countenance such a Relief Bill,
and was the cause of Pitt's resignation of office. But it was obvious
that it was now only a question of time, and Catholics took courage
and heart. Their numbers increased. In 1816 Bishop Milner says
that the Catholics in the Midland District numbered 15,000 as against
8,460 in 1780. Ten years later again it is put at 100,000 in round
numbers. Even the Western District showed visible improvement.
In 1815 the number of Catholics is given as 5,500, as against " the very
few " of 1780. In London itself, Dr. Poynter states that in 1814 the
the Catholic Church in England 127
city itself was served by thirty-one priests, ministering in twelve
chapels to an estimated Catholic population of 49,800. In the
country parts of the same District the Catholics are put at 18,976. A
map in the archives of Propaganda, dated 1826, gives 200,000 as the
entire number of Catholics in this District. And after the Catholic
Emancipation Bill of 1829 had been passed Bishop Griffiths estimates
the Catholics of London at 146,000, the general population of the
city being then about 1,500,000.
It is unnecessary to pursue the actual history further. The
complete emancipation of Catholics in 1829 naturally led, in 1850, to
the restoration of normal Church government, which had been lacking
for three centuries. In Ireland the Church had never lost its
Hierarchy, and even through the darkest days of persecution the con-
tinuity of the episcopate had been preserved. In England, alas ! it
had been allowed to lapse, and normal Episcopal government had
remained in abeyance until Pius IX., on September 29, 1850, erected
new Sees in place of the old ones which Pope St. Gregory had estab-
lished for St. Augustine's mission nearly thirteen centuries before.
When we recall the state to which the long years of persecution
had reduced the Catholic body at the dawn of the nineteenth century,
we may well wonder at what has been accomplished since then.
Who shall say how it has come about ? Where out of our poverty,
for example, have been found the sums of money for all our innumer-
able needs ? Churches and colleges and schools, monastic buildings
and convents, have all had to be built and supported; how, the
Providence of God can alone explain. There have been failures and
mistakes and losses, plenty of them, and inevitable during such a
century of reconstruction as we have passed through. It is not for
us to say how much we may have gained or how much we may have
lost, provided that we have done and are doing, each in his own
sphere, our duty to God and His Church. Work is the best test ;
and looking back there is sufficient evidence of this to make us
thankful to God for His loving mercies.
From the first years of the nineteenth century, when the principle
" suffer it to be" was applied to the English Catholic Church, there
have been signs of the dawn of brighter, happier days for the old
religion. Slight indeed were the signs at first, slight but significant,
and precious memories to us now, of the working of the Spirit, of the
128 The Catholic Church in England
rising of the sap again in the old trunk, and of the bursting of bud
and bloom in manifestation of that life which, during the long winter
of persecution, had been but dormant. Succisa virescit. Cut down
almost to the ground, the tree planted by Augustine has manifested
again the divine life within it; it has put forth once more new
branches and leaves, and gives promise of abundant fruit.
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